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Bargain "Classics"--$12,000 or Less and 20 Years or Older
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Now there was a little Virgil Exner excess. How many different pieces of glass were on that thing? I'm thinking it had a dozen or so including the windshield!
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My grandparents had a 1982 Malibu Classic Estate wagon, with the anemic 229 V-6. They bought it in February, 1982. It was cold, and nobody even thought to try opening the rear windows. Well, fast forward to a hot Sunday in April. I went to church with my grandparents, and Grandmom sat in the back seat. She started fumbling around, looking for something. We didn't know what was going on, until Granddad asked her, and she replied with "how the hell do you open the g_____ window?!" That's when we discovered there were no window cranks back there!
Grandmom called that thing "the most expensive cheap car we've ever owned". I think they paid about $11K for it, but could be mistaken. That sounds kinda steep to me for a car with the V-6 and crank windows. It was a sharp looking car though, in midnight blue metallic with fake woodgrain. The ECU ended up frying on it, out of warranty, and set my grandparents back about $450. Then it fried again. Granddad was fed up with it, and they traded the car, without getting it fixed, on a brand-new '85 LeSabre Limited. I still remember Grandmom saying that they looked at a pretty light blue one first but it wouldn't start, so that gave her a bad vibe, so they bought a dark gray one that fired right up.
As for the 1981 Malibu, you should be thankful you got the wagon, because that year, I think that was the only body style of the Malibu that offered the 305! I think the sedan and coupe could only be had with the 229 V-6 or the tiny 267 V-8.
Probably the last car totally and completely designed by one man after WW II was the Austin Mini.
Funny, we made a similar move. We got the Malibu as my dad's company car when we moved from NY to Calgary, Canada for a couple of years. Couple of years later, we got back to the US and ended up in Houston, where we replaced that wagon with a 1983 Buick Electra Estate with the Olds 307. And I thought the 305 was slow, but I guess it could have been worse because the 350 diesel was pretty popular around then too. Learned to drive on this car, and much to her dismay my younger sister ended up with it as her first vehicle (beats the bus). Except for its tendency to eat up the horrible early-year GM 4-speed automatics, the car was a pretty solid tank that served us well until it just became an extra car and I sold it for dad in 1993. Got a grand for it, even with oxidized paint and lots of fake woodgrain missing.....
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Maybe so. But I'm still inclined to give Raymond Loewy credit for originality. His '53 Studebaker coupes influenced the Citroen DS, and the Avanti is like pretty much nothing else before or since.
Still, that doesn't explain some of the earlier monstrosities. Chrysler styling in general really started heading south starting in 1959. According to Wikipedia, Exner had his stroke in 1956 while working on the 1961 models. He returned to work in 1957, to work on the 1962's. Did they really have THAT much lead time on the cars back then?
Anyway, the shrunken 1962's were a sales flop. The styling might have worked better on a bigger model, but who knows? Exner was used as a scapegoat for the whole fiasco, and fired. I think Colbert himself got fired a couple months later.
I'd say Loewy was maybe more a stylist than a total designer?
At least Issigonis had a hand in the WHOLE car, top to bottom, even designing the suspension system.
So I decided at that point we'd keep the car until the next emissions test, and make the decision to keep it or dump it depending on whether it failed, and if so how badly. Unfortunately a few months before that, the car made the decision for me. I had it out at my condo (we'd sometimes keep it there, sometimes at my grandmother's place), and hopped in to drive it to work one day. The brake pedal went right to the floor when I pressed it, and I decided right then and there to not put another dime into it. Ended up selling it for something like $800. It had about 157,000 miles on it.
If I really needed the car, I would have been willing to put the money into it. But at the time I was still making payments on my 2000 Intrepid. And I had recently bought a 1979 New Yorker, and liked it better than the LeSabre. Plus, my Mom had an '85 Silverado she was thinking about getting rid of, and I figured it was easier to bring plywood and 2x4's home from Home Depot in that, than trying to strap that stuff to the LeSabre's roof, like I'd done in the past!
One of the managers at work had a 1987 Electra Estate wagon, and I think he got it up to around 150,000 miles. It ate one transmission, but I forget at what mileage. GM did manage to get most of the bugs worked out of that transmission, but I imagine it still wasn't a good idea to put that in a heavy station wagon body!
The 1960 compacts were an interesting story in their effort to cut into growing sales of the VW Beetle and other imports like the infamous Renault Daphine.
I liked the styling on the early Valiant sedans. I thought it was a bit unique, but kind of classy for a low priced compact car as well. The cars had a bit of a European flair in their design as well as Chrysler touches like the protruding 300 like trapezoidal grill and some of them had the wheel stamping on their trunk which was a feature introduced on the 57 Imperial and carried over to other cars shortly thereafter like the 59 Plymouth.
The Corvair was another interesting car. Besides a rear engine, it also had a rather new and novel design and look. It had some styling cues from its big brother 59/60 full size cars. The 4 door had a flat top roof and a sort of wrap around rear window like the Impala 4 Dr HT, while the coupe had an arched roof like the other model full size Chevy's. I though Bill Mitchell did a beautiful design update on it for 65, but by then the Ralph Nader publicity and the Chevy II assured the Corvair had seen its peak.
The Rambler American was probably the first truly successful American compact. While it came out in 58 I believe, its roots went back to the early 50's. Despite a restyle in 61 that was a bit funky, it was a steady seller.
Studebaker brought out the Lark in 59 which sold well enough to give the company a few more years of life. Since it was really a kind of chopped full sized prior Studebaker, it had more interior space and in that respect was perhaps more like the 62 Chevy II.
Ford stuck to a traditional style and format. It sold the most cars in the first half of the 60's. However, as the Chevy II morphed into the Nova it, along with the redesigned Valiant/Dart, usurped the compact market later in the 60's and well into the next decade. However, the Falcon chassis gave us the Mustang which created the all new Pony car segment during that same time period.
I don't know, the rest of the car looks in good shape, so I'd think they'd use some care on the repaint, but it looks more orange than the red color I found for that year.
http://www.tcpglobal.com/aclchip.aspx?image=1960-plymouth-pg01.jpg
And sure enough, there's an orangish-red called "Valiant Red"!
Our Valiant was buggy as all get out. kills me to hear all of the stories of folks getting decades of use out of them. Ours wasn't one of them.
When I was maybe 8 our next door neighbor bought a new Studebaker Lark. I rather liked it.
Bill Mitchell was probably my favorite designer of that era, but I liked Virgil Exner as well. I think Brooks Stevens was probably the most underrated designer. It was amazing what he accomplished as essentially a free lancer for the independents like Kaiser and Studebaker, and he did it all on very small, restrictive budgets. Years back I was in the Milwaukee area and there was a museum with his vehicles. There was a lot of neat stuff, including some future generation Studebakers that would have been pretty modern and innovative if the company could have made it for a bit longer.
As for the 62 Polara and Fury, I thought they were decent enough looking cars given the situation, and I think the sales flop had as much, or more to do with trying to sell a shrunken full size car against the competition at similar prices. It was the usual story of management screwing things up. They thought the Chevy II and forthcoming Malibu meant that the Impala was downsizing. Kind of the opposite of what poor Dick Teague experienced when management made him take his decent looking Marlin concept and bloat it into a whale. I saw some pictures of what the full sized 62's were supposed to look like. Its hard to tell, but I think they would have sold better. Some of them weren't as sharply angled as the actual 62's, reflecting rooflines more like the 63/64 Chrysler had. However, some of them also had that chicken wing, or inverted fin thing of Exner's that I didn't care for too much.
Ironically, I think the poor selling 62 Polara and Fury actually ended up influencing future intermediate cars. Many of them ended up having similar styling cues, dimensions and proportions. Take a look at the 70 Monte Carlo for example. I think the mid 70's GM Colonade coupes really reflect the long hood, short decklid styling of the 62's.
Now the 63's were just patch jobs waiting for Elwood Engel to redesign them. Unfortunately, they looked like patch jobs as well!
I think the 61 DeSoto and 61 Plymouth were Exner's nadir, similar to the 58 Oldsmobile and Harley Earl. In fact, I think the 61 Plymouth may have been one of the ugliest cars ever produced. I think its just plain rude. Its so ugly you can't even say its cute! But then, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Oh I agree on the 1961 Plymouth! I have an auto encyclopedia that says the '61 Plymouth sparked a whole generation of Japanese sci-fi movie monsters!
I thought the 1962 Plymouth was pretty ugly too, but have to admit I like the shrunken 1962 Dart/Polara. Still ugly, but in an endearing sort of way! Supposedly they actually were pretty good cars. They were almost as roomy inside as a Chevy, but I think Fords were a bit roomier in those days. And being lighter, I'm sure that engine for engine, they had to be better performers than their Ford/Chevy rivals. But the cars just LOOKED small.
Styling might have had a hand in it too, though. I think a 1962 Chevy is a gorgeous car, almost perfect. And a '62 Ford, while more conservative and upright, is still a handsome car IMO. Compared to those two, a Dodge or Plymouth is just a mess, style-wise.
I've always wondered if Chrysler made the 1960 and 1961 Plymouths look ugly on purpose to get people to buy Dodge Darts instead? And with the 1961 DeSoto, not only was it uglier than a Chrysler, but I think it was almost $100 more expensive than a Chrysler Newport, so it gave little incentive for people to buy one, unless they were a die-hard DeSoto fan.
I used to hate those slanty-headlight Mopars when I was a kid, but I think they're kinda cool, nowadays.
In a sense, yes. I think he was a "total designer" in that he envisioned the visual aspects of the car as a whole rather than obsessing over fussy details (a la Exner, Earl, et al). But he definitely wasn't an engineer like Issigonis, Porsche, or Colin Chapman. I think that's the difference. Even if he had been, though, I doubt Studebaker would've had the cash to put any serious innovation into the underpinnings.
Nice clean design, unfortunately put on top of a 1935 chassis with a flathead 6 cylinder engine. The car that looked like a sports car but drove like a haywagon.
Didn't the Citroen DS pretty much carry over the engine from the prewar Traction Avant? The Stude six was economical but dated, as were offerings from Willys and Kaiser-Frazer. The company's V8s were more modern, but Olds, Cadillac, and Chrysler had the engines to beat by '53. I find it difficult to imagine that buyers of a Champion Starlite really thought they were getting a sports car, what with the (admittedly cramped) bench seating for six, the column-mounted three speed, the "flexible flyer" chassis, and that anemic engine. Still, I wouldn't mind getting hold of a Studillac (a period conversion with the Caddy OHV V8). There's a Mechanix Illustrated road test of a Studillac here.
IMHO pretty much everything coming out of "Detroit" in the Fifties handled poorly by more modern standards. The US manufacturers didn't really discover handling till a generation later, with the second-generation Corvair and the various machines built for the Trans-Am Racing series.
Aero styling, active suspension, excellent fuel mileage, superb ride and comfort, the DS had a lot going for it. Remember even Rolls Royce leased their suspension system.
As for RR leasing the Citroen suspension design, I remember all too well how that worked on '70s Silver Shadows. An integrated hydraulic system for suspension and braking, special Castrol RR363 fluid, a complex auto-bleed procedure, and (if the proper maintenance was not performed on a rigid schedule) algae buildup. I hope Citroen owners had a better experience. . .
Which reminds me, by way of drifting subtly back toward the topic, that one could actually buy a used Silver Shadow for $12-15k, if one were inclined to learn some very specific (though not particularly difficult in themselves) maintenance and repair procedures. There's a black '71 on eBay right now, with 51k miles, at a buy-it-now price of $10,995, and a '69 for a buy-it-now price of $15,000. Naturally, I have no affiliation with either automobile.
One would, of course, have to be willing to make certain other commitments, in order to ensure that the proper impression was made. The most expensive car ever made is either a cheap Rolls or a cheap Ferrari.
Now's your chance! Besides, an old Shadow will just grind you into the dirt in short order. These cars have an awesome power to destroy people. It's like messing with Black Magic.
It's like the difference between a '57 T-Bird and a '58.
Of course, if you have Jay Leno's checkbook---NO PROBLEMO---
These are pretty awful cars you know. You may never get to where you are going.
You won't see a Corniche at $12K (YET!) but I can see Shadows and even Mulsannes dropping under $10K by the end of the year if the economy continues to worsen.
The problem is that once they get to that price level (and they've been there before), the guys who "think" they can handle one get in over their heads, and the costs pile up, and pretty soon you have $1500 worth of salvageable parts, or something that costs thirty grand to put right.
I've seen the same phenomenon with 911s, too.
If I ever really get the space to take on a "project car," mine would be more likely to be a W108 series Mercedes 280SE. It's almost as classy as a Shadow, and vastly better at mundane tasks like, um, going somewhere.
There's really no end to the stuff from the '70s and early '80s that $12-15k would buy. An XJ-S would fit (there's a lovely '95 XJS convertible on eBay with a buy-it-now of under $10k), as would a Porsche 928 if you're not picky about model year. A 6-series or 7-series BMW? A Mercedes 450 (maybe even a 450SL)? The aforementioned Rollers?
The thing is, they're not exactly classics, are they? And they are frightfully expensive to maintain, unless you're willing to DIY (and learn how different they are from Detroit iron!)
A 928 will kill you
A 450SL might be okay if you start with a good one. They're pretty reliable except for the climate control system. Just turn that off.
Jaguar XJS will nickel and dime you, but you might struggle through one okay.
Rollers are, as we said, a very big risk.
So I'd rate them, in terms of cost to own, as follows:
BMW 735
MB 450SL
Jaguar XJS
Porsche 928
Rolls
With the first two being "predictably okay" (and the most boring) , the Jaguar being "it could go either way for you" (fun and risky) and the bottom two certain disasters (but real fun while it lasts).
Hmmm...have you noticed the ratio between fun and disaster here?
Yup. My heart says XJS, but my folks lost a lot of money trying to keep a very nice one (with the HE V12) from dissolving in the driveway within a two year period. And it was only five years old when they got it. When that car was really right, it was phenomenal. I think it was right perhaps three days a year.
If I were seriously shopping right now, I'd probably go for the 450 SL, since as long as it's maintained it is unlikely to drop too far in value, and I already have lots of Mercedes-specific tools from my previous misadventures with a 300SD. I really don't think the 735 would provide me with the pleasure that I would demand in return for the headaches. A nice 3-series, on the other hand. . .
*sigh*
Ah well, back to the real world, where I commute back and forth in a ten-year-old Civic. Thanks for the break!
This car, the New Yorker, is a rolling testament to how bad cars in the 80's were. And yet I still found myself attracted to it because of it's uniqueness and relative rarity (at least here in the Rust Belt).
A classic? Technically yes. Classically bad. Yes. But definitely a throwback to another time.A classic car, and I imagine parts are cheap, since it is a Dodge.
On another note, the first gen Miata is approaching 20 years old. Not technically a classic, but truly a classic car. Decent ones can be had for a few thousand.
Believe it or not, a 1982 New Yorker was probably one of the BETTER cars to come out of Detroit that year. Once you got it started, at least, and before it tried to stall out on you. And as long as you got the 318 and not the slant six, which was still offered in these things in 1982 and 1983. The 318 was probably one of the most durable engines out there at the time, foreign or domestic. Ditto the Torqueflite transmission. FWIW, the slant six was still pretty durable, but just underpowered, was very temperamental with the emissions controls, and in a car that heavy, actually got worse economy than the V-8 under many driving conditions.
Chrysler's M-body was also a pretty sturdy, solidly-built car. It was smallish compared to something like a Caprice or Crown Vic, but weighed about as much.
As for something like a '55-57 Chevy, I remember as a kid (I was born in 1970) that '55-57 Chevies were all the rage. You could get model kits of them, and they were a fairly common sight on the streets. One of my cousins had one, a turquoise 2-door wagon (not a Nomad). And the cars were even in pop culture around that timeframe. In an episode of "The Brady Bunch", Greg bought a 1956 Chevy convertible...although the car fell apart on him! In an episode of "Three's Company", Mr. Roper sold the kids what he thought was a 1957 Chevy, and then tried to get it back because some used car dealer told him it was a hot car, and worth a lot of money. So he got the kids to sell it back to him, only to remember that he bought it in September 1957, but it was a 1958 Chevy!
If I were going to go that direction, I think I'd stick to the GM B/C bodies, ideally starting with the 1977 "downsized" models. These cars are plentiful, even now, and eminently upgradable. They were roomy and comfortable without being unwieldy. Their lines were clean and fresh compared to the fussiness of their predecessors. They handled better than either the Chrysler or Ford counterparts, and the uplevel F41/FE3 suspension options are easy to duplicate with NOS or aftermarket parts. And while the garden-variety Chevy 305 wasn't too hot in stock trim, a simple 350 crate motor transplant can cure that, or you could go for a Buick or Olds (personally I'd go for an Olds Ninety-Eight) with the 403 Olds motor, which was considered good enough for the '79 Trans Am. (OK, how good did it have to be in '79?) From '77-79 they all came with the three-speed Turbo Hydramatic 350 transmission, which was nowhere near as temperamental as the early overdrive automatics of the '80s.
I had an 81 Regal as my first car(in 1994), with the 3.8 V6. I know how awful those emissions choked cars can be. And yet, I still search for one now and then, although with a V8! Although I'd rather have a Lincoln Mark VII LSC. It would, in my dream car collection, blend together the Regal and the 84 Eldorado I had after it as "the car I really wanted"
I had an '82 Cutlass Supreme with the 231 V-6, in 1993-94. It ate the transmission...and this was the "good" transmission, the THM350, not the junky lightweight THM200C! That was around 61,000 miles, but the car was 11 years old, and I only paid $800 for it, so can't complain. The engine started crapping out around 72-73K miles. First, it lost all oil pressure. We replaced the pump gears, which got the oil pressure going again, but you could still tell that the engine wasn't long for this world. Still, for what as bad as that car was, I really liked it a lot. It was good looking and comfortable. It wasn't so hot from 0-60, but passing power wasn't bad, and it was a good highway cruiser. It was a light silvery green/blue color called "jadestone", with matching rally wheels. Sharp looking car.
If you ever do search out a Regal or similar car, I'd say stick to 1985-87. I can't remember what V-8 the Regal offered in 1981, but I think it was something sucky like a Pontiac 301, or maybe just a Pontiac 265 or Chevy 267. Buick was messing around with turbo engines back then, and trying to push them as an alternative to the V-8. For 1982-84, I don't think you could get a Regal with a V-8 at all. Just the 3.8 V-6, 4.1 V-6, or the 3.8 turbo. I think it was 1985 that they started offering the Olds 307 in them. It only had 140 hp, but was pretty torquey and gave a good blend of performance and economy in these cars. Also by 1985, GM had most of the kinks worked out of the 4-speed overdrive automatic.
Those Mark VII LSC's were sharp cars, too. A co-worker of mine had a 1987 that he bought in 1989, and then a 1992 that he bought in 1994. He had a long commute, and ran each of them up to around 150-175,000 miles. Unfortunately, he replaced the '92 with a brand-new 2000 Lincoln LS that was such a bad car it sent him to Acura, and he never looked back.
The 928 is exciting to drive and a horrendous maintenance glutton. The '82 Chrysler is boring as hell and probably can be fixed for $12 at Autozone.
But you can still buy one and enjoy it once you know what you're in for and you forgive the car's failings.
so you buy a 928, don't whine when the clutch costs you $2,000 bucks or you need a timing belt every 30,000 miles for $1,600. That's just the way it is.
The Jaguar V-12 is self-correcting, as it will catch fire and burn the car to the ground sooner or later. (just kidding, I hope that doesn't happen to the vigilante!)
As for GM having worked out the kinks in the OD automatics by '85? Not in my experience. The only way I could make my '85 Monte Carlo 4.3 shift smoothly into 4th (or out of it) was to do so manually. This was a perfectly maintained car, from day one, and the tranny never acted like it was going to fail on me, but it sure was a rough beast. Once it got into 4th, it was loath to come back out of it, unless I either shifted it manually or dropped below 30 mph. Worse still, that big V6 was horribly cobby at low RPM, so the whole damn car would vibrate at 40-50 mph in 4th. On the other hand, it was pretty nice at 75, and usually got me 24-26 mpg.
Overall, the carbureted 3.8 (231) with the three-speed in my wife's '79 was a smoother powertrain than the fuel-injected 4.3 with the four-speed, except when the 231's carb was acting up. IMHO the injected 3.8 that showed up in the FWD LeSabre ca. 1986 was a sweeter engine than either one.
What about the aluminum 4100, 4500, & 4900 Caddy V8s from the '80s? Any love at all for those engines out there?
I think Cadillac played around with digital instrumentation a lot. The Buick Regal offered it as well, but I'm not sure what other cars did. I remember my 1985 Consumer Guide called the Regal's digital display a $299 waste of money. I think it gave you a digital readout for speed, fuel, odometer/trip odometer, but nothing else. No trip computer, no extra gauges, etc.
I remember my '82 Cutlass Supreme had a rocker switch for the headlights, with a little thumb wheel that controlled the brightness of the interior lights. It looked neat, but seemed more complicated than just making a pull switch where you pulled half way for parking lights, all the way for regular lights, and just twisted for dashboard brightness.
Not sure when they started redoing the a/c controls, but the control unit in my 1986 Monte Carlo was identical to the one in my '85 Silverado, '82 Cutlass Supreme, '80 Malibu, and '76 LeMans. They'd change stuff like the labels, knobs on the levers, etc, but the basic unit was the same. Now my grandmother's '85 LeSabre had automatic climate control, a $150 option on top of the a/c (which I think was $750 itself), which gave you a membrane control panel that had buttons sort of like the hand controllers on my old Intellivision II video game. It was neat to look at, but unfortunately pretty useless. Where the regular unit had four fan speeds, this thing just had "low", "auto" and "high". And if you wanted to quickly change the temp from, say, 65 to 85, instead of just quickly sliding a lever, you had to hold a button and wait at the thing moved in 1-degree increments, beeping each time.
I do remember the 4-speed in my grandmother's LeSabre being too eager to upshift. If I put it into first gear at a traffic light and manually shifted the gears, it seemed pretty quick, but left to its own devices, it was much more grandmotherly. Around 45 mph it would tend to hunt back and forth between 3rd and 4th, but sometimes at higher speeds, once it went into 4th, it was reluctant to come out of it unless you really gunned it. And 4th was such a loafy gear that you had to almost peg the 85 mph speedometer before you felt any real power in that gear.
Now my '86 Monte Carlo, which had a 305-4bbl and the 4-speed, was much more responsive. It would still hunt between 3rd and 4th around 45 mph, but otherwise it seemed to work better with the engine than the one in my grandmother's LeSabre did. I guess part of it was that the Monte was lighter than the LeSabre.
So maybe "getting the kinks worked out" wasn't the best phrase to use. What I meant was that they were fairly reliable by that time. The LeSabre's tranny had 157K on it when we got rid of it, and the Monte had 192K on it when I got t-boned.
What about the aluminum 4100, 4500, & 4900 Caddy V8s from the '80s? Any love at all for those engines out there?
The 4100 was probably one of the worst engines ever built, but I heard the 4500 and 4900 weren't too bad. Lemko had a 1994 DeVille with a 4900, so he'd be better qualified to comment on that. My grandmother's cousin has a 1989 Coupe DeVille with a 4500. I think she has about 90-100K miles on it, and considering that she doesn't take care of it, I'm impressed that the engine has held up this long! Personally, I think she needs to dump the thing before it leaves her stranded somewhere. My grandmother doesn't drive anymore, so her cousin and her ride around a lot together. The thought of two 84 year old ladies riding around in that thing kind of scares me sometimes. Oh well, at least they never go very far.
And I wouldn't be afraid of the car if it had been taken care of, but I just know that it hasn't.