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I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today! (Archived)
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The seller would probably doubt me on that, but I can say with confidence that I'm a lifelong student of that era Chevrolet, LOL.
I was looking at a used '72 Impala convertible in a Chevy dealer showroom sometime in the early '80's. They were touting the car as "all original". It had pull straps added to the interior door panels. I mentioned that to the slimy salesman there. He said "nuh-uh". I said "Even the Caprice didn't have pull straps that year". "Nuh-uh".
Hitting-head-on-wall moment, LOL.
To my eyes, the '73 is the worst-looking Chevy of the '71-76 iteration (I hate the side moldings above the front wheel openings), lamest full wheelcovers, and the pic is the worst '73 color (Chamois). All just MHO of course.
Too bad those nice blues faded in popularity in the 70s, replaced by earthtones. Browns and golds work on the right car, but I'd rather have blue.
This showed up in my YT suggestions, maybe relevant to some here:
The '72 Chevy brochure doesn't list interior specs, but the '73 brochure lists them, for the 4-door sedan. They list the front seat at 42.5", and the back at 38.8".
Now, if you went to a C-body, which actually had a larger passenger cabin, in a '71 Electra, at least, you got 42.6" up front for both models. The 4-door hardtop had 40.3" in the back, while the hardtop coupe had 39.3"
So with the B-bodies, at least, the only body style that really got any benefit from its larger size was the Grand Ville hardtop coupe. And that advantage was because of the more formal, upright roof that allowed them to put the seat further back.
At least, back in '67 for example, when they made the Executive and Bonneville bigger than the Catalina, they added all the extra wheelbase, and length, in the back. You didn't get any extra passenger room, but the trunk was bigger.
Y'know with the '71-76 Chevy, the '73 is my least favorite, too. I think every other year looks good, and while there are some I like more than others ('72 is actually my favorite grille), the '73 is the only one that I really don't like. There's just something about the way the headlights, in their separated bezels, just seem to "hang" in the pattern of the fussy grille. And the first year of those hulking 5 mph bumpers was rarely something to be proud of. For '74, when they went to a taller, more formal grille, I thought it looked a lot better, because I guess the bigger grille helped balance out that bulky bumper.
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Maybe others had flow thru vents before Detroit but smoke bomb nanny tech was job #1 at GM.
You could either ask, "please don't smoke in my car," or just turn the key.
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As for that Bonneville, I want to like it, but I always hated the way the landau roofs on these cars looked. It just looks too thick, ill-fitting, and makes the car look top-heavy. And I think it's a shame, because the regular Catalina/Bonneville/LeSabre roof, with the large, triangular shaped quarter window, is very attractive in my opinion. And, yeah, I know I've hated on the 301 in the past, but these days, I figure if the car looks like it's been well taken care of, the chances are that engine has a lot of life left in it. And I'm not buying a car like that to go auto-crossing!
I just watched a little of the video. Just a nitpick, but none of these ever got Chevy 350's, at least they weren't supposed to. Pontiac quit making its own 350 after '77, so for '78 you got a Buick 350, which was a bit torquier, but less hp. In California and high altitude areas, they substituted an Olds 350. Sometimes an Olds 350 would make it into a 49-state car.
The 403 was also a replacement for the Pontiac 400, in California/high altitude areas. I don't know if it ever made it into 49-state cars, like the Olds 350 did, though. I imagine with the engine roulette games they were playing back then, it was quite possible.
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Without it, these were objectively handsome cars. Looks a bit thick with the skirted style, but good colors and cool wheels, and a big angular greenhouse with thin pillars.
No skirts on the Catalina:
The Buicks were nice too. In the small town where I lived when I was younger, there was an elderly man several blocks over who had a beautiful old house and a LeSabre coupe of that style, he kept the car and house pristine - seemed like a classy setup. I want to say it was silver and grey or black two tone, but it has been 25+ years since I saw it, memory has faded. Looks best on rally wheels:
My favorite B is still a '77 Caprice Classic Coupe, no vinyl top, no optional body side moldings, the Sport wheel covers (scooped-out plastic spoked cover), F-41 suspension which required the bigger tires with the pinstripe whitewalls....and I'd also want the optional upper-body pinstriping.
Car and Driver tested a sedan that looked like this, but I can count on one hand the number of coupes I ever saw that looked like that. I bet 90 percent-plus had the bodyside moldings.
We had a new '77 Impala, and a friend's parents got a new Caprice Classic sedan, which had more soundproofing. I remember thinking theirs was as silent as a vault on the highway. I had never been in such a quiet car before. Too bad that totally whisper-quiet is passe today.
I just saw this '77 Caprice Classic that had been sold. I like the car, although the wire wheel covers have been added at some point as they were not available in '77 except for the mid-year Landau coupe. This car originally would have had the full wheel covers or the Sport wheel covers I prefer. If I bought the car, I'd find them and put them on.
As usual, body side moldings, but I guess I can't order a new one today without them.
In profile, Mitchell's 'sheer look' is apparent.
I just noticed the larger gap at the front of the door than the rear. Left side is like that as well. I think some of it is the car has door edge guards at the rear, but as we know, that kind of fit was probably A-OK then.
The way Pontiac did the two-tone on those cars was a perfect two-toning point IMHO.
P.S. I still want that triple-black '67 2+2 hardtop, in spite of what I said about door panels, LOL.
I was 0 years old when the downsized cars debuted so I don't recall how they were received, but I have to imagine it was like looking at something from the future.
Mitchell used to talk about the sheer look, with something I never quite understood about doing the design in wire and draping a sheet over it with wind and the sheet would fall into perfect place over the wire (???)--but I took it to mean the one gentle arch from front to back at the top of the sides. I dunno.
The Chevy to me looks simpler, maybe younger, than the others, but in a way I think it also looks more feminine than the others, LOL.
In general though, they were a smash hit. Although in reading the automotive history books and seeing old sales statistics and such, the downsized Pontiacs were a bit of a disappointment. The Catalina especially was disappointing. In '76, they sold 10,248 wagons, 15,262 hardtop coupes, and 47,235 pillared sedans. Pontiac had dropped hardtop sedans from the Catalina line after 1974. For '76, they sold 13,058 wagons, a slight increase, but only 14,752 coupes and 46,926 sedans.
The Bonneville did pretty well, but I've read that overall, Pontiac was expecting these cars to be more successful. However, it should have been encouraging that the most popular Bonneville was the Brougham sedan, with 47,465 built, compared to only 13,697 of the base sedan. So that showed a buyer preference trending towards more profitable, expensive cars. In contrast, for '76, the Bonneville sold 14,942 base hardtop sedans and 20,236 Brougham hardtop sedans. And, just as they had dropped the hardtop sedan from the Catalina in '75, they dropped the pillared sedan from the Bonneville in '75. That year they moved the Bonneville to the Grand Ville roofline, rather than the generic B-body roof.
Pontiac had a similar problem in '78 when they downsized the LeMans. The '77 had only sold about 80,000 units, and the '78 saw an improvement, to about 120,000. If you use percentage increase as a metric, the LeMans did quite well. That's about a 50% increase. In contrast, Chevy sold about 327,000 '77 Malibus, and 355,000 '78's, so their increase wasn't nearly as great. And in the Buick/Olds ranks, sales of the Century and Salon actually fell, compared to their '77 counterparts. Still, I think Pontiac management was hoping for more. I think it's a bit hard to directly compare the midsized Buicks and Oldsmobiles, too. In '77, you could still get a Century coupe, or a base Cutlass coupe, that looked really good, so they were still reasonably popular. Once they were replaced by Aerobacks, that just made a lot of the coupe buyers move up to a Regal or Cutlass Supreme notchback coupe.
In general, Pontiac's mid- and full-sized cars just never seemed to recover from the first Arab oil embargo and ensuing recession the way the other divisions did. The Grand Prix did well for awhile, but once downsized it never saw the same popularity of its siblings at other divisions.
I think what hurt Pontiac the most was that even more of the design and engineering was taken away from the division and they were mostly corporate cars. While for the first 3 years the engines were a mix of divisional designs and corporate substitutes, really all they had to differentiate themselves was interior and exterior styling. Pontiac didn't do a bad job of that but apparently it wasn't enough given the competition from the other GM divisions at similar price points.
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My Dad and grandfather would get an invitation to new-car introduction night at the Chevy dealer, which was a big deal. Cider, donuts, scoop up all the brochures (one per model line at Chevy), register for the door prizes. And there'd be a lot of people there. My Dad and grandfather, and I, would go even if we'd bought a new car in the summer. Most everybody just wanted to see the changes. I know it's called 'planned obsolescence', but it built excitement, even though almost always in hindsight, the first year of a new style is typically the best IMHO, and subsequent years get changed with styling that wasn't the first choice, LOL.
In the early '70's, our Pontiac dealer always had a very large wall hanging behind clear plastic, that showed each series' seating availability and styles, with color drawings of the various choices and details about color and what the upholstery was called. There I remember seeing interiors I'd never seen on a real car at the time--like early '70's Grand Prix bench seats; Ventura and Executive cloth seats, etc.
So a lot of my car fascination, as a kid, had more to do with the older ones, and less with the latest ones. I think the first new car introduction I can remember being a big deal, was the 1980 Citation. "The First New Car of the 1980's" the ads proclaimed, and at the time, it certainly seemed like something out of the future. I also remember being enamored by, don't laugh, the 1980 T-bird. Mainly because, in the commercials, they showed the digital display, and that was the first time I had seen something like that.
I do remember, when Mom was thinking about a new car to replace her '75 LeMans, seeing a fairly new Caprice or Impala in a parking lot, and it caught Mom's eye. And that was probably the first time I really noticed them, and I liked it alot. When she bought her 1980 Malibu coupe to replace the LeMans, I liked it a lot better than the LeMans. Part of that though, was that I liked its medium blue color a lot better than the persimmon/bronze-ish color of the '75. I also thought the '75 was ugly. But when it came to stuff like modernization and space efficiency, I don't think I noticed it. Mom is only 5'8", so either car was plenty big enough for her. And I was only 9 when she bought the Malibu, so I wasn't really cognizant of how much more legroom the Malibu had in back. I do remember thinking the Malibu's dash seemed much more futuristic, and I did like the squared-off, angular look of it compared to the curviness of the LeMans. The main thing I remember Mom being pleased with was that it could easily get mpg in the lower 20's on the highway, whereas about the best she could get with the LeMans was 15. And with gasoline consistently staying above $1/gal, that was a big deal! Especially since in those days, 24 hour gas stations were a rarity. Many were closed on Sundays. And they did occasionally run out of fuel, during those Oil Embargo days.
I can also remember Mom taking me with her one day, when she went with one of her friends who wanted a new car. This was in the 1981 model year. We went to a Pontiac/Dodge dealership. I was enamored with a St. Regis, and a Bonneville, that they had in the showroom. My Mom's friend ended up getting an Aries wagon, which I thought kinda sucked.
Also, where we lived, there weren't any dealerships that were really close by, so it's not like I could walk or hop on my bike and ride up to one. The nearest new-car dealer back then was probably that Pontiac-Dodge dealer, and that was about 6 miles away, and to get there you had to get on some pretty busy roads. I would've got my butt whooped if I went out there by myself!
Now, when I got to driving age, I enjoyed going out to various dealerships to look at cars. But usually it was the used cars that caught my eye, not the new ones. When I was in college, especially, I hit the used car lots a lot. I went to the University of Maryland in College Park, which is on US Route 1. In those days, there were all sorts of shady little used car lots all up and down Route 1, and even a couple of junkyards. I started college in 1988, and even by then, there were plenty of cars from the 70's and early 80's that I liked. I can still remember one day, in 1989, stopping at a little lot just north of Laurel, that had this gorgeous 1976 Ninety-Eight 4-door hardtop, in a medium blue as I recall, for about $1500. I fell in love, but that was a lot of money for a college kid in those days.
Now that I think back on it, there was this one little lot, near the funeral home that's buried most of my family over the years that would sometimes get some interesting stuff in. Often it was total junk. I remember once looking in the Sunday paper and seeing they had both a '77 Catalina and a '76 LeMans listed. The Catalina was only $295, and the LeMans was even cheaper, at $195. I went up there one night, after they were closed, and looked around. The LeMans was nowhere to be seen. But the Catalina was there, and unlocked. It almost looked like it had been in a demolition derby! I don't think it had a straight body panel left on it, except maybe the roof. And the interior was trashed. I called them a day or two later, out of curiosity. They said that they were unable to sell the Catalina (probably worried it was a lawsuit waiting to happen!). And the LeMans was "no longer available". Probably junked already.
I remember going by that lot again in 1992, after my '69 Dart got totaled and I needed a replacement. They had a 1980 Mirada with a 318, for $1500. But it was pretty ratted out. I found a 1980 Olds Ninety-Eight coupe, black, with an Olds 350, at a more reputable dealer, also for around $1500...in retrospect I should've bought that one! But, I ended up getting a '68 Dart 270 with a rebuilt 318 under the hood that looked a bit ratty, but also a bit evil, in primer black.
I just looked up that old used car lot on Google maps. There's nothing but a fenced-off, empty lot there now, although it looks like there's a little used car lot just to the left.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9468129,-76.941226,3a,75y,243.66h,73.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sXqbJHPy9WpbM51aZhwlneQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
Mine: 1995 318ti Club Sport-2020 C43-1996 Speed Triple Challenge Cup Replica
Wife's: 2021 Sahara 4xe
Son's: 2018 330i xDrive
I still recall my "first" sightings - Ferrari, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, special Porsches, etc. Also recall the first MB W124 I saw, sticks with me for some reason.
this story before but I think it’s funny. One evening he came home all upset and grumpy. Asked what was wrong he said he had just scuffed the whitewall on the curb. After mom entered the garage ‘hot’ in the Buick and bumped the washer and dryer her dad quickly bought her a used, well worn 51 Olds 88.
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^^^ Nasty corrosion happening above the taillight. I guess quality wasn't Job One at Ford back then.
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The other one was a black one that went over an embankment in an episode of "Barnaby Jones" and blew up. The clip of it crashing and blowing up also showed up in an episode of "The Night Gallery" looking like stock footage. Oddly, the "Night Gallery" episode was older than the "Barnaby Jones" episode. But in "Barnaby Jones" the car was more worked into the plot. You saw a character driving it, and then later knocked out by someone else, and then the crash was staged. In "The Night Gallery", it was just a quick clip of the car crashing.
I wonder if the actual crash was stock footage from something earlier than both shows, and it's just that "Barnaby Jones" went through the effort to find a black one for new footage. They did that on an episode of "The Incredible Hulk" where they cribbed a bunch of stock footage from "Duel", but then found a similar-year Valiant, painted it orangish-red, and used it for new footage.
I guess another possibility is that they actually wrecked the car for "Barnaby Jones", and then slipped the footage into "The Night Gallery", sometime later in syndication. "The Night Gallery" was originally an hour long for its first two seasons, and each episode had 2-3 stories. In syndication, it was cut to 1/2 hour, but the original stories weren't always a good fit for that format. Sometimes I think a longer story would get trimmed down, but in other instances, I think they found a way to pad a shorter story, with stock footage.
With a white top, this would be a twin to my dad's car. I remember the upholstery design. It also had dog dish hubcaps (while being a moderately equipped Country Sedan), but had thick trim rings which effectively covered the wheel.
I like the pic of the old couple with the black Starliner. To people who likely grew up before cars were really common, that must have been like a spaceship.
Carl Reiner's car in The Russians are Coming the Russians are Coming was a black 60 Galaxie, this is another fun one kind of in the same vein of IAMMMMW that I enjoyed:
On TV, as Dennis the Menace was Ford-sponsored, there are some good shots, I recall these (I wonder about the color combo of that wagon, I imagine it being two tone blue):
Also in Lassie, I remember seeing this when in syndication around 1990:
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Last year, "Collectible Automobile" did a pretty good spread on the '57-59 DeSoto Firesweep, which was DeSoto's attempt to move downmarket a bit, into Dodge territory. It mentioned that some of the cost cutting moves were to make backup lights optional, and give it one-speed windshield wipers instead of two-speed. Stuff like that seems so trivial to me, almost to the point of being petty. I'm not sure, but in the 4-door sedan I think they also made carpeting optional...standard you just got a rubber mat. Stuff like that just seems like really cheaping out to me. I could understand having a rubber mat in a really low-end car, like a stripper Chevy, Ford or Plymouth. But you'd think on a mid-range car, like a DeSoto, carpeting would be expected.
But, maybe I'm just looking at it through modern eyes, and my own personal experience. For instance, I tend to think of air conditioning as mandatory equipment, as in you ordered it even if it was optional, but power windows were a luxury thing. When I was a kid, that's more or less how it was. But these young-uns today, if they see a car with a window crank get on Twitter and post a meme about it!
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2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
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