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Masseratil Merak? around 1975.
Either that or a Lambo Urroco. I always got them confused. And spelled wrong.
2020 Acura RDX tech SH-AWD, 2023 Maverick hybrid Lariat luxury package.
Now these are Mystery Cars.
It's a Merak
I didn't to that well, but there are no correct choices for #11.
Funny site, like a flashback to 1996 in its construction. All the blinking was about to give me a seizure, so I stopped
Take a look at the source code on the home page too; it's a hoot. @explorerx4, I think that's the idea - no cars given away there!
Gran Turismo>
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
UH! Car GOOD! Man WANT!
Happy new year...
Alfa Romeo 1900 Super Sprint - circa 1956....
Not sure this is easier to reply to posts - why can't we just have a reply button? Also, how do I go back and find say a particular entry from a month ago - there doesn't appear to be any numbering of posts, or any way to go back for example to a page last summer except by trawling back a few pages at a time. This update might work fine for posts that go on for a week, but won't work so well for long standing ones like this with a history going back nearly a decade and a huge number of different posts.
One way is to use the search under the Forums link at top left, and click the down arrow for the options. Here's a pure "date" search for example (click the pic for the bigger version):
Yup that's a **'55 Alfa-Romeo 1900SS
**, a very pretty GT variant of their pioneering 1900 sport sedan.
I agree that there should be a reply button and posts should have sequential numbering. It would also be nice if the "quote" function worked better.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Snow day-
Except for the cars Burlington VT looks much the same today>
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Firebird, Rabbit, Citation, LeSabre/Electra, Omni/Horizon, Celebrity, Civic, Celica....
I think I see an early Prelude covered in snow, parked, center right.
G'day
This one should be a challenge for all but the Australians; even then, only a few will know what it is! Very, very rare, and a weird story to go with it.
This comes from my trip on Tuesday (New Years Eve) to the Australian National Motor Museum in Birdwood, South Australia. Birdwood is about an hour from Adelaide with all access roads difficult. We drove up the Torrens River Gorge, a twisty road clinging to the cliff faces, passing many over-keen cyclists, puffing hard up-hill. Glad that we did not meet many riding back down! The Motorcyclists were a bit too serious for my liking. The road back was only marginally better.
As it was 38C (100F) by 11:00am, it was a trying day!
Bonus points if you can identify the cars in the background!
Cheers
Graham
I'm gonna take a wild flyer on this one Graham--a Bolwell? If so, that's a pretty rare piece.
Is it as described on the sign? Good res on that pic...
G'day
Shifty, not a Bolwell which was a bit later and well into supercar league; unfortunately they did not have a Bolwell Nagari on display.
This one was tiny with a Villiers 324cc engine. The fuel gauge was a plastic pip on the dashboard which could read anything from full to empty depending on gradient!
Cheers
Graham
Ah, what a cruel disappointment....okay, I'll try an even wilder one---a Buckles----
I'll take the blue Lewis engine on the stand behind the green mystery car.
Can anyone tell me the make & model, time is around 1947.
Hi Graham
Not sure how I can edit having posted the above but I mistyped the last sentence - it should read "but the red one with the cream roof " - otherwise it makes no sense...
Looks like a '46--'48 Buick Roadmaster.
You have 4 hours to edit... click on the "gear" symbol at the top right..
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Sign says "1963 Lightburn Zeta Sport", and goes on to describe it...so that's my "guess"...
I need a 70" monitor to fully take advantage of these hi-res pics.
BIG one>
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
The tomato-red one with a huge butt is a '60 Dodge Phoenix. I have no clue about the others.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
Everybody's getting in the act.
Can you identify this snowpocalypse sculpture? (BBC)
1966 Cadillac Fleetwood.
(I wish we would go back to the "old way" of doing things here).
To me, that's the last of the truly great Cadillacs, although there are a good number I like after that. I tend to like the '65 a bit better, but that's a beauty IMHO.
The interiors and instrument panel are magnificent IMHO (before a whole lot of padding and energy-absorbing became required), and I always liked the lack of a molding smack down the side and I always liked the individual "FLEETWOOD" lettering on the front fenders.
Magnette, The little green sports car is indeed a Lightburn Zeta Sports. It was made by the Lightburn company on a site near Adelaide Airport. Harold Lightburn had a vision of a major industrial corporation developing in South Australia, building upon a base of manufacturing washing machines and cement mixers. They had developed genuine expertise with fibreglass, a post WW2 miracle product.
Mum had a twin tub Lighburn washer which provided some entertainment but did little practical to wash clothes - a paddle swished back and forth in a tub of water and after some time you did arcane things to change the water, rinsing the soap suds out, before thrusting a tiny load into a minuscule spin drier. The advent of an automatic washing machine was a major advance from mum's perspective!
The Zeta was mostly built with what appeared to be a hatchback, but the rear window did not open. The Sports was a little runabout, devoid of doors which presented problems for young women, its prime target market. Getting out of such a car, without flashing their underwear was a challenge requiring a girl to drive several times around the block to find a discrete place to climb out. In a mildly funny postscript, our daughter has recently done a modelling course to help with self confidence and presentation. Her mother wickedly suggested that a useful skill from this course would be how to get out of a sports car without flashing her knickers, or how to climb out of an SUV gracefully in a tight skirt - neither seems to have featured in the training!
I think there were about 300 of the sedans made and about 25 of the sports. A remarkable number of these remain intact as they had novelty vale from their creation. An average Sports would set you back about $40K.
The red car in the background is indeed a Dodge Phoenix, assembled in a Chrysler plant in Adelaide as an Australian equivalent of a Dodge Dart. A better photo below gives and idea.
The vinyl roofed GM product is a mid 50s FJ Holden, freshened up by adding a tacky vinyl roof, probably in the 1960s. The FJ was a robust light car, developed from its immediate predecessor the 48/215. By the early 1960's more than half the cars being sold in Australia were Holdens. IN recent weeks, GM has announced that it is quitting Australian production, their market share having fallen to negligible levels
Cheers
Graham
What is the newer white car in front of the red pictured? It looks Fordish with 98-02 Town Car wheels
2025 Ram 1500 Laramie 4x4 / 2023 Mercedes EQE 350 4Matic
1966 Cadillac Fleetwood.
I had a '66 coupe way back when. I rescued it from a wrecking yard of all things. Really nice car. I sold it to a guy who had a HUGE German Shepard. The dog loved the back seat. Whenever the car went into reverse, he would turn around and face the rear of the car, then when you put it in drive he'd turn back around and look out the front.
Looks pretty inviting to me--'66 Fleetwood:
http://images.mecum.com/SC0511/SC0511-106694/images/SC0511-106694_5.jpg?lastmod=051911154433
Looks like mom's couch--LOL!
Can anybody identify the wreck behind the Fab Four?
Not sure Lemko, but it's probably a prewar or immediately postwar English Ford Prefect, Anglia or Popular.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Perhaps an Austin 12
G'day
This is a modified Holden Caprice from about 1991, used by the Australian Prime Minister
http://motor.historysa.com.au/collections/modern-vehicles/1991-holden-vq-caprice
Recently, the Australian government has announced that they are replacing the latest iteration of the Holden Prime Ministerial car with a BMW High Security 7 series. These are available off-the-shelf from BMW and offer VR7 ballistic security, which is hard to engineer into a modified car.
Until very recently, there had not been great concerns over vehicle safety for politicians. Indeed, the first fully protected vehicles have only been deployed in the mid 2000's. This Holden Caprice had toughed windows some Kevlar sheeting and limited armouring. However it did have run flat tyres good for about 100km if damaged. There was also limited training for drivers.
The shift in attitude to security of our Prime Minister reflects changes in our perceptions of the world. In 1977, I was part of a college team competing for the university "Bush Week Scavenger Hunt". As this was in Canberra, Australia's capital, there were a lot of political and government themed assets which were listed with varying points. The list was lengthy and you could try for many items or one or two high scoring ones. In prior years, teams had successfully removed state boundary signs and borrowed the large brass plaque from the Police Headquarters (done with uniform-like white overalls and an official looking form, suggesting it was being sent for cleaning).
Almost inevitably, one or two student teams would do something which drew the attention of the local police, who generally adopted a benign attitude. Canberra had a very small-town feel to it with a population of about 200,000 and University pranks, like turning the fountains green or foaming were regarded as normal. A relative, now a retired general, woke to find himself, in his own bed, in the middle of a large shallow fountain with the Police looking-on bemused - it must have been one hell of a party.
A regular Bush Week theme was to install a toll booth across a University road, used as a short cut by commuters; think of the Toll Booth scene from Blazing Saddles and you get the idea. The funds raised went to local charities and it reduced traffic flows on campus, so everyone was okay with it; the police would send down a motorcycle cop who was inclined to book any drivers attempting illegal U-Turns to miss the toll booth - about one booking every fifteen minutes persuaded the queue to pay the nominal toll.
If things got really problematic, the part time magistrate who was always rostered to preside in Court on the day of the Scavenger Hunt was also Dean of the Law Faculty and took a calm approach to misdemeanours. It was all remarkably laid back.
The list of scavenger items in 1977 included the highly implausible, including the 258 foot tall Australian American War Memorial (universally known in Canberra as "Bugs Bunny" as its its stylised wings, either side of a sphere mounted above a huge column, look remarkably like Bugs's head, in silhouette) and other similar items.
At number two was the Prime Minister's private car, a Lancia (he was a noted Lancia lover). Our team cursed, because this car had been parked out the back for a couple of months whilst his daughter lived in college. She had just moved home and we figured that we might inquire whether she could borrow it again. At this distance in time, it seems unbelievable that a bunch of kids could turn up on the Prime Minister's doorstep and ask to borrow his car, but we did. He was supposedly very severe, but was good-natured and suggested a compromise; we could borrow the Australian Flag, Number-plate and a wheel trim from the official Mercedes. This was a Mercedes 450SEL which caused controversy when purchased, as Australians still “remembered the war” It was okay to replace the Bentleys which had been used since 1963, but not with a German or Japanese car.
We were also able to "borrow" the official butler from the Prime Minister's residence (I now think that he was really sent along to protect the car bits). When we turned up at the judging the following morning, we enquired about bonus points for "kidnapping the Prime Minister's butler" who had tolerated us remarkably well. The judge (who was another of my cousins) suggested that "He might be worth a few hundred points!". The butler, exquisitely dressed in tails and previously perfectly mannered, speaking with a lovely quiet Irish lilt, suddenly shouted "I better be worth more than a few hundred ****ing points", causing some consternation; we did negotiate a suitable bonus.
Another team pursued the Deputy Prime Minister's Fishing Gear, as he was known to be off trout fishing in Tasmania and hence it was unlikely that they could be obtained. Again, someone in the team knew his wife who lent them one of his old fishing rods.
Until the last minute, we thought that we had won. However a team of two Forestry students arrived with nothing but a Polaroid photo and a US Silver Dollar. Using their tree climbing skills, they had scaled the sheer outer surface of the Australian American Eagle and photographed themselves with the Silver Dollar atop the sphere. Their evidence was reinforced by the offer "If you don't believe us, you can ask the Commonwealth Police who brought us down!".
In an odd way, I suspect that the Scavenger Hunt served a larger purpose. All of the folk that I knew on the successful teams have been very successful in later life; perhaps the resourcefulness demanded in "scavenging" has wider application; it certainly showed me that it is always worth asking politely for something implausible; you never know what might happen.
I cannot imagine any head of state passing over bits of the official car today. The Australian attitude to risk was badly shaken in 1978 when a bomb in a rubbish bin exploded during a conference of heads of government in Sydney. However we are still nowhere as security conscious as the USA. Our Prime Minister travels by scheduled commercial flight if he thinks it appropriate. There is a sense of wonderment when senior US officials arrive here and the full motorcade saga occurs. Even the decision to purchase the BMW High Security cars is perceived as over-the top.
Personally, I would prefer a little more security consciousness; I dealt with many insurance claims after terrorist bombings in the UK through the 1990s, have written and lectured extensively on the problems terrorism causes and hope we never see it here.
Cheers
Graham
Thanks for the information. The attached picture is the wheel I was thinking of. Obviously, I couldn't have been more wrong!
2025 Ram 1500 Laramie 4x4 / 2023 Mercedes EQE 350 4Matic
As Fin said, it' certainly an Austin - I think it's more likely to be a prewar one - the front wing looks different from the post-war 12 and 16, I think - but there were quite a few prewar models of Austin that looked very similar - this could be a 14 or even an 18 - they made a couple of saloons with similar styling, and the only variation was the wheelbase, I think, called the Goodwood and the Cambridge. There was even a longer wheelbase version of the 10 at some stage that looked like this too.
I think it's a '45 or '46 model
Graham
Thanks for all that on the Lightburn Zeta - an interesting car. I've never seen one and didn't realise it wasn't a hatchback, although it would have been very advanced if it had been as they were made before most of the major manufacturers had cottoned on to that idea.
I loved your other comments about the scavenger hunt, and it does seem incredible that you could get access to stuff like that - years ago I suppose it was like that in lots of places - Scandinavian royalty and prime ministers etc are probably not particularly closely protected, even now, although given recent events in Norway, and the assassination some years ago of the Swedish Prime Minister I would hope they have more security now, but I can also remember reading somewhere about the time when President Eisenhower stayed at Windsor Castle (or possibly Balmoral - somewhere royal anyway) and the security basically consisted of a copper outside the bedroom door.
Given the unfortunate history of these things in London it is understandable that photographing outside embassies can be difficult these days - about fifteen years ago I took a picture of the Japanese Ambassadors official car outside their embassy and had a brief encounter with the embassy security chap and someone who I presume was Met Diplomatic Protection- but they only wanted to get my details and they must have checked me out - when I got home later that day they had left a message on my home answerphone saying they had rung it to confirm I lived there. I recall seeing a car with diplomatic plates near the American embassy which I wnated to photograph the same day but decided not to photograph that as I guessed that would be more sensitive.
Back in the ~90s, friends arranged to tour around Australia in an RV. As they approached the rental counter, the agent looked up at the person just walking in and started chatting to him, as if to wait on him first. My friends objected and the person who had just walked in graciously agreed - by all means help the first in line folks. All was well.
A couple of weeks later our friends returned to the counter and learned that the accommodating gentleman was the PM. Not only that but the RV he got (presumably the one that our friends would have been in line for) broke down on the road.
Best seller. Well, its stable mate is.
new range rover. I'm sure they may call it something fancier, but the "real" RR
2020 Acura RDX tech SH-AWD, 2023 Maverick hybrid Lariat luxury package.
Yep -- this one is the limo version of the the fastest-selling car in America in November.
"From the inside, the rear quarters are now positively palatial, with genuine space to lounge even if you were at the front of the queue when God handed out height. You can have a standard bench seat or individual "Executive" chairs that adjust electrically in 18 different ways while massaging, heating or cooling your derriere."
The Luxury SUV for Those Who Like To Be Driven
Interior shot: