I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today! (Archived)

lemko

Shoot, I would LOVE to have that 1976 Buick Electra but not at that psychotic price. The "1934 Packard" has an instrument cluster from a 1982-87 Mercury Grand Marquis!

andys120

I saw a pretty good replica of the classic old Auburn Boattail Speedster parked in downtown Portsmouth NH. It looked pretty convincing and only small details like backup lights betryayed it's modern origins. The fenders, grille, windshield etc were rendered perfectly.

It had handsome disc wheel covers instead of the more commonly seen chromed wires. More here.

Mr_Shiftright

Doesn't look too bad but the interior isn't very good. And of course the pipes are phony...well actually the whole car is phony, so I guess that's okay then. I dislike cars like that because they distort history for younger people, who think this plastic thing is the real car. If it had "FAKE" written in script on it, I'd be okay with that. But people add 1935 license plates and even register them as 1935 cars. Really ticks me off

fintail

I remember in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" there is a scene with a (fake) Auburn boattail speedster. But the one in the movie had a back seat, and the convertible top was very upright like on a touring car. Even when I was a little kid, I knew something was wrong with this.

kyfdx

A guy here in town has a real one.. But, he's moved on.. His real interest is in "Brass Era" cars..

andys120

Fin, there were probably more 851 with back seats than without. Perhaps the one in Indy Jones was a real one like this>

Mr_Shiftright

They had two-speed differentials that you could dial in through the steering hub I think it was.

fintail

Nope, the car in Indiana Jones was a boattail, I rememeber it vividly

Here's a link to the car from the film

Yeah, that's not right

lemko

I remember Madonna driving a fake Speedster in "Dick Tracy."

Mr_Shiftright

How appropriate.

fintail

I spotted a BMW 316 hatch today...the 'Manx kitten' as I always called it.

oregonboy

Are you referring to the 318ti?



james

fintail

Oops that's what I meant, 316 was a Euro version maybe

kyfdx

That's what my son wants for his first car... 2.5 years away, though.

oregonboy

The 318ti was generally unloved by the market. Personally, I have always liked them, as they offer the versatility of a hatch with BMW driving dynamics. Yes, with a BMW inline-6 it would be far sweeter, but I could live with a four.

Good ones are scarce and will be even more so in 2.5 years. If I could justify owning 2 cars, I would probably have bought the pristine, low-mile, blue, 5-spd, cloth interior, sport package 318ti that came up in Craig's list several months ago.

Here is an automatic , "California top" model currently for sale in my region (I would prefer a conventional moon-roof, or, better yet, a solid roof)

BMW 318ti

Mr_Shiftright

Eh....it's a car I'd tend to avoid if I were you....but no harm done if you find a cheap one and you're handy with tools :P

magnette

Re your e-bay batch last week, I quite liked the 2CV, and actually saw a 50's one last Saturday, while I was driving to Wales. It was in good condition, actually, and the chap driving it was smiling as everyone passed him, drifting along at about 50 when everyone else was doing about 75.

The Johnson/Zimmer thing is particularly hideous - I saw something like this, but a stretched white four door one, used as a wedding limo I should think when I went to a car show last year - truly a bad car - and I didn't know what it was, because it wasn't badged.

bumpy

hatchback today.

Mr_Shiftright

I saw a few weeks ago, remember...a 50s Chrysler wagon with tiny chrome fins?...that must be a '56 then....that's a rare car....never saw one before.

I'm going to post my neighbor's car collection (now displayed on the street under blue tarps) and you can see if you can identify them before I call the tow truck (just kidding--one or two of them are actually worth keeping and pretty nice, and I think they all run, believe it or not).

Watch for it---there's one REALLY hard one in the batch to identify.

Mr_Shiftright

Well this wasn't worth saving now was it?

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/car/362904233.html

fintail

These gussied up Buicks could be handsome

If you need art moderne styling

Poor little things

You won't run into yourself at a stoplight

Not many of these around

" A MUST HAVE CAR 4 TOYOTA COLLECTORS"

" you will not regret buying"

Roller skate

Insane

Amazing condition

Sad

How not to style a car

I like this unrestored state, good bidding

Excess

Mr_Shiftright

Graham Sharknose --- these make GREAT street rods!

'61 Desoto--god, what a mess. No wonder they went out of business.

58 Olds--not pretty but better than a '59 Caddy or that '61 Desoto---at least all the lines go in the same direction. It's just too much of something, like a "triple underline" on a word on a page....as opposed to chaotic doddling ala Cadillac or the Desoto....my two cents....

LaSalle--they WERE handsome cars...I wonder why they failed?

grahampaige

Graham Sharknose --- these make GREAT street rods!

Nooooooooo............

My suster had one of those Honda n360 coupes, a lot of fun, but a mobile speed hump. didnt have enough power to get out of its own way.

andre1969

'61 Desoto--god, what a mess. No wonder they went out of business.

I always theorized that Chrysler made the 1961 DeSoto look ugly on purpose, to make it fail on purpose and so that nobody would miss it when it was gone! By that time you could get a Chrysler Newport for about $100 less, and while it had the same overall look, it had a much cleaner front end.

I actually like the overall shape of the body. In profile, it doesn't look all that different from the '57 models, just with sharper, more creased tailfins and a roofline that is more similar to a '57 Plymouth/Dodge than a DeSoto/Chrysler. But by 1961, that body shape looked really dated compared to cars like Mercury, Olds, and Buick, which were DeSoto's primary competition.

I never did care for the '58 Oldsmobile. I think the only attractive part of the car is the grille. My Granddad had a bunch of those Motor's Repair Manuals from 1960 to 1976 in his garage, and they'd show pics of the car grilles for identification purposes, and went back 7 years. So his 1960 book went back to 1953. I remember as a kid, looking through the books at the various pictures of the grilles, and thinking that the Olds grille was really neat looking. I didn't know what a '58 Olds looked like, but I knew what a '58 Chevy looked like and thought they were cool cars, so I figured that, just going from that grille pic in the book, the '58 Olds must be really nice! Needless to say, when I finally saw a picture of a '58 Olds in a classic car book, I was really disappointed.

For one thing, just seeing the grille, by itself, with the rest of the car cut away, in that book it gave me the perception that the car would be a sleek, modern looking thing (well, modern for 1958). But the car itself is a boxy, clunky looking thing. Style-wise, I consider the '58 Olds to be the "most fallen" car, compared to its '57 counterpart. The Oldsmobile name must have still had some magic in it back then though, because it was a fairly strong seller in that recession year.

As for LaSalle and why it ultimately failed, I recall some old commentaries that mentioned buyers of the time didn't care for the car's front-end style, with the overly tall, too-narrow grille. It may be considered stylish today, but at the time, people may have thought otherwise.

Mr_Shiftright

Yes your point about the LaSalle is a really good one. Things that appear "okay" to our modern eye might have really offended the 1940s eye. That's hard for us to understand but if you think about it, every new design has not yet been gotten "used to" and might have been too shocking. There are many cases of older cars being very unpopular, and the reasons given in the period press of those times makes no sense to the modern reader.

'61 Desoto--Andre, you'll just die as an apologist for Desoto, won't you? Well that level of loyalty is admirable--there are few cars I would do the same for. But your theory of intentional destruction is too complicated...the real answer for any disaster is usually the simplest one...a cash-strapped enterprise committing one last desperate act that followed a line of marketing and design errors. In a sense the last Desoto couldn't have been anything other than it was...the final effect of a long line of causes IMO.

andre1969

Well, I can't PROVE that they made the '61 DeSoto ugly on purpose so that people wouldn't miss it, but I think it kind of makes sense. Chrysler did a similar thing with the 1960 Plymouth and the Dodge Dart. The '60 Plymouth is so flat-out ugly that I'm sure they had to either bribe Hugh Beaumont to drive one in the '59-60 season of "Leave it to Beaver", or perhaps use a stunt double. But the '60 Dart is drop-dead gorgeous in comparison. Admittedly, a bit dated-looking compared to a '60 Chevy or Ford, which is what they were pitting these cars up against, but the public must have liked them, as Dodge rolled off something like 330,000 full-sized Darts that year. And once you factor in the "traditional Dodge-sized" Polara/Matador, total sales were probably around 375,000. That might have actually been a record for Dodge at that point.

In contrast, I think Rambler slipped past Plymouth in 1960 to claim third place in sales, and that kind of marked the first nail in what would ultimately be Plymouth's coffin. Back then, GM was actually pretty good about keeping the various divisions from competing too much with each other. Chrysler had been good about it, up until around 1955, but once they decided to let Imperial fly as a separate marque, they decided to start pushing Chrysler down into lower-class territory, where it would start competing more with DeSoto and the pricier Dodges. And that may be why they started pushing Dodge downscale with the 1960 Dart.

The market was good enough in 1957 to allow Dodge, DeSoto, and Chrysler to start overlapping, but once the 1958 recession hit, coupled with Chrysler's quality control woes, it just all went to hell really fast. The middle-priced market in general just grew too quickly during the good part of the 50's, and when the '58 shakeout hit, the middle-priced market contracted the quickest.

Also looking back, I guess once Chrysler went to that canted quad headlight style for 1961, there was only so much you could do with the style cheap and quick to differentiate it. I don't think a '61 Chrysler is too bad looking, actually. The '61 DeSoto makes me think a bit of the '58-60 Lincoln up front. I wonder if they had just dropped that upper grille where the "DeSoto" lettering was housed, and put on a sleeker hood that fell down to the level of the lower lattice grille, if the overall effect would have been more attractive?

I think I read somewhere that the main reason they issued a 1961 DeSoto at all was to just use up a lot of the DeSoto-specific trim pieces. When you think about it, issuing a car that looks like an ugly 1961 Newport, but priced about $100 higher without giving you any added value, just seems destined to fail. In the end, they sold something like 3034 1961 DeSotos, in just two body styles: 2 and 4-door hardtop. It's probably a miracle that they sold that many! I imagine that if they had a cheaper 4-door pillared sedan in the mix, and carried out a full model year instead of cutting off production on November 18, 1960, they might have pushed it up to 20,000 units.

mazda6iguy

This morning on the way into work I was driving behind a 1959 or 1960 Buick Electra 225. Beautiful car.

texases

Wht's not to like?

andre1969

y'know, in black, it actually does town down the hideosness of the car to a degree. Still, the only thing I really like about the car is the roofline, which looks like it was lifted off the 4-door hardtop version of the '57-59 Mopars, just with a B-pillar added.

Mr_Shiftright

If you could get one of these as all all-black coupe with black interior and dog dish hubcaps on blackwalls, that wouldn't look too bad at all.

andre1969

If you sought out a lower-line car, like a Savoy or Belvedere 2-door sedan, that might fit the bill. I don't think they offered a 2-door sedan in the higher-line Fury that year. The hardtop coupes were odd looking beasts that year, with kind of an odd, exaggerated reverse-slant kick to the C-pillar, kinda like that trend that Nissan started with the '02 Altima, and has been continued in cars as varied as the VW Passat and Buick Lucerne. The 2-door hardtop also had something called a "sky-hi" rear window that was great for giving the rear seat occupants some killer sunburn.

fintail

I think the front of the car is funny, with its chrome eyebrows that make it look like it is glaring at you. I see this theme has reappeared in recent years. Nothing intimidates more than something like an Elantra with its glaring eyes. Something I surely must move over for! Although having that Plymouth rush up behind me might be a little more intimidating.

andre1969

I've always had a hard time deciding which is worse: a '60 Plymouth or a '61. I've heard it said that the front-end styling of the '61 Plymouth was grotesque enough that it sparked a whole generation of Japanese movie monsters! On one hand, the '61 Plymouth is finless, and IMO at least, appears to be a much more trim size than the '60. Although I'd imagine they're both around 209" long, so it's probably a visual trick. But then the '61 just had that awful front-end and that scalloped rear end with the taillights just stuck on.

Anyway, as hard as it must have been to sell a '60 Plymouth with nicer looking products such as the Dart, Chevy, and Ford out there, I'm sure it must've been near impossible to sell one in '61. Even if the '61 Plymouth wasn't much uglier, I think the '61 Chevy was really on top of its game, and the '61 Ford was a handsome beast. The '62 Dart wasn't bad, I thought, except for those odd reverse-slant tailfins.

imidazol97

which one?

Reposted below... car year was wrong.

andre1969

Actually that's a '58 and a '59. The '60 Buick is kind of a toned down, boring version of the '59...

andys120

Your picture is mislabeled, that's a '58 not a '59 Buick. The '59 looks almost the same as the 60 you've posted (@ least from that angle)but it has squared fender tips, the '60 has more rounded fin tips.

This is a '59>

andys120

I disagree Andre, I rather like the '60 now, although I didn't back then.

Note the curved fin tips in the earlier photo, correctly labeled a '60.

Mr_Shiftright

I think fins need to be straight up if at all...slanting them just makes a car look goofy...it's hard to take a car seriously when it has slanted wings...it looks like someone stepped on it.

andre1969

yeah, now that I look more closely, I can see the difference in the back between the '59 and the '60. I didn't realize that they were both so similar from the rear! I just figured that since the '60 got toned down so much up front compared to the '59, that it would've gotten toned down in the rear, as well.

Almost kinda Ford-ish, with those round taillights. And I do think the '60 Buick is growing on me a bit, although it's a bit staid compared to the '59 with the slanted headlights. I also like the ~61-62 Buicks, with the peaked front fenders.

andre1969

I think fins need to be straight up if at all...slanting them just makes a car look goofy

I think another rule of thumb with fins is that there should only be one to a side. Some cars actually tried running TWO fins on each side! The '59 Pontiac did this, although overall I think the '59 Pontiac is still a good looking car.

I had thought the '59 Mercury did it as well, but on second glance, it did kind of the same thing that the '58 Chevy did, with one fin sticking out at roughly a 45 degree angle, dipping inward at the back, and then kicking back out to join a lower bodyside crease.

fintail

Today I saw a beautiful creme-yellow Porsche 356 cabrio (it had wing windows), and to top it off, some kind of 1960s Ferrari. I don't know what it was as I only got a passing glance as it drove by my window, but I would be it was some kind of 250 car. It reminded me of a 275 at first, but I doubt it could have been one of those. It was that close-coupled 3 window design.

And to come back to reality I also saw a decent '68 Ford 4 door hardtop.

I also saw a horrible sounding MB R107 (70s-80s SL). I could hear it coming, I thought it was this ratty ca. 1978 Monte Carlo that drives up my street now and then. So I look out my window, and a 70s SL drives by, it actually even looked pretty nice. Did someone maybe drop a big American engine in it?

Mr_Shiftright

Not easy to get a big engine in a 280SL but I've seen it done...it's a rare conversion since the car itself is now quite valuable and the original engine is not hard to rebuild. 280SLs can move right along if they are driven correctly.

Most V8 SLs ARE ratty, because cost of restoration far exceeds value.

magnette

You had a TV programme called "Leave it to Beaver" ?

magnette

Just seen an MG 1 1/4 litre YB going round the corner at the end of my street. Circa 1952 - looked in good condition...

andre1969

You had a TV programme called "Leave it to Beaver" ?

Yup. And from what my father told me, that word meant the same thing when he was a kid, and even when my Granddad was a kid, as it does today! And silly me, I thought it originated with trucker talk on the CB radios, and was first popularized in that context on "Smokey and the Bandit"! :P

I've heard that originally, the marketing department at Chrysler wanted to name Dodge's version of the Duster the Beaver, and supposedly they even had a cute little cartoon character made up for it. In the end though, they decided to go with the name "Demon". Probably a good thing, too, because I could just imagine ad copy saying somthing like "Try our new Beaver on for size" or "Slip into the new Beaver and feel a new driving experience."

And I could see the comments around the water cooler at the office. "Hey man, Phyllis let me try out her Beaver during lunch. It was awesome!" And a few years later, as these cars became raggedy..."Hey man, u still got that worn out old Beaver?" Or "Honey, I think it's time to trade the Beaver in on a new one".

And at the Mopar Nationals in Carlisle, PA, it would be like "Wow, check out all the Beavers!"

But then, considering some of the innuendo they slipped into car ads back then, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad? But Gawd, as a kid in the 70's, I could see my friends ragging on me if my Mom pulled up and I hopped into her Beaver!

Mr_Shiftright

YB is not popular in America...my impression is that it is a very clunky looking car next to its contemporary TC. It's not one I would care to own but I guess they have a period charm that someone in the UK could appreciate or understand. I saw one fail to sell on eBay for $20,000 reserve and I thought that $10,000 would have been more than enough for it. It's....homely....

fintail

Today I saw another W111 fintail. And it was blue, a shade darker than mine. It looked to be in excellent condition. Sadly, I was not in my fintail when I saw it.

I also saw a silver 190SL, no old American iron that I can recall.

altair4

With the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix coiming up next weekend, you should see the stuff floating around here! Every year it's the same - all the old British roadsters come out of hiding. Yesterday, I saw an original Mini (in that British racing green) that made the new ones look positively huge.

stickguy

A Bradley GT. Looked a bit ratty. Not sure if it ran.

It was parked outside a small, dumpy auto body place. They have a few other oddballs in the back lot, but I can't recall what they are now!

lemko

When I was in Canada last summer, there was a gasoline station selling a brand called Beaver.