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I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today! (Archived)
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http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20090102_ap_rare1937bugattisupercarf- oundinenglishgarage.html
it's kind of funny to me to think it was only 23 years old, when last driven, and has been sitting around for over twice that long, since then.
i did see a late 70's green tbird today. not quite the same thing.
2016 Audi A7 3.0T S Line, 2021 Subaru WRX
If it happened to be a '82, the first model year for the Celebrity, you would have discovered Motor Trend's Car Of The Year. Of course, judging from Motor Trend's dismal track record with its cars of the year, that may explain why you chose that model as an example of an unremarkable, forgetable car. Or am I being too kind with those adjectives?
California plates naturally.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Good bids on this forgotten marque
Who actually bought these when new?
Globalization will bring us cars like this
The style of bathtub Packard to have
Rare Packardbaker
This got bid up pretty high
Preservation
Maybe an Andre-mobile
But I think this is more his style
Options galore
Can't be many of these left
Someone went all out
Lotsa miles here, still going strong
Easy access seats
Possibly the worst thing on ebay
"Super Duty"...says it all
This seller loves old barges
Marmon---fine automobile, and first car to win the Indy 500.
48 Packard Super 8 convertible -- bids are way too low. This car should bring $40K or more.
1958 Studebaker Wagon -- now that's going to be a b** to restore. One of 159 made? Hope you never crash it.
AMC Pacer -- well as long as they don't attempt to drive it anywhere. GEEZ, $6700 bid? People are crazy.
53 Benz diesel -- asking price is mighty, but who knows? If it was a gas car, he could get that $$$ for it, but a diesel, I kinda doubt it. This is a rough little powerplant and absurdly slow. 0-60 in maybe 30 seconds, if ever. Nice for a museum maybe.
1976 Pontiac Bonneville -- current bid is $100.Does anybody care? Doubt it.
'58 Packardbaker--rare for a reason. You know that but what a sad ending for a once-great marque.
'62 Pontiac Catalina SD/421--before there were muscle cars the real hot shoes of the early 60s bought these stripper Poncho, Fords and Dodges with big motors, stick shifts, bench seats, dog-dish hub caps and lighter non-hardtop bodywork. The car shown was probably lighter than the typically optioned '64/'65 GTO h/t or 'vert and faster too.
Sleeper? You bet if it didn't have an engine badge you 'd think it was a police cruiser unless untnotice the stick shift or the big tail pipes. Love it!
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
IIRC, the Celebrity didn't even outsell the Malibu, the car it was supposed to replace that year. Even in 1983, I think the numbers were close. However, part of that may have been the model mix. While both offered 4-door sedans, the Malibu had a wagon in '82-83, which the Celeb didn't have until 1984. The Celebrity had a coupe (well really more of a 2-door sedan), while the Malibu dropped the coupe after 1981. The Malibu wagon was pretty popular even in those down years, but the Celebrity coupe was kind of a flop.
I've joked with my uncle in the past, that if something ever happened and I'd die prematurely, they're gonna have a heck of a time clearing out my estate. He just said nah, they'd call the crusher and clear it out all at once! :surprise:
WVK
1. The nicest car the family ever owned... it had a very luxurious interior - to the point of having a pair crystal flower holders.
2. It was silent.... my grandfather loved to sneak up behind people who were walking along (not always family!) and blow the horn.
3. It was incredibly powerful... my grandmother once drove it home with the parking brake on and never noticed. She got caught when my grandfather happened to look out the window and notice her coming up the drive - with smoke billowing from every wheel!.
4. Aluminum body work. My grandfather always claimed some sort of plot by the steel companies stopped car companies from producing aluminum cars after the Marmon.
I don't know what model it was - My memory says was one of the Marmon Sixteen's but it was probably a Marmon Big 8.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/marmon-cars2.htm
My sister, 1200 miles away) has all the old family photo's - I'll see if I can get her into nostalgia mode deep enough to look for old car pictures! (Wish me luck).
The pciture below is a 1930 Big 8
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Shifty the Host
2016 Audi A7 3.0T S Line, 2021 Subaru WRX
finding a picture of the chassis was the only thing i was looking for.
Chevy priced the '82-model Cavalier and Celebrity, for what they were, way too high. In '83 both were reduced in MSRP and content added (and in the case of the Cavalier, the engine bumped from 1.8L to 2.0L). Later on, say '84 and later, both lines were strong sellers.
Bill
Heck, if I could get that thing for $100, I'd snatch it up in a heartbeat! FWIW it's up to $2700 now. It's actually been on eBay for what seems like forever now. It'll usually bid up to $6-7K or more, but never hit the reserve, so then just gets re-listed.
You'd think that the seller would figure out that it ain't going any higher...he might as well just bite the bullet and sell it while he can, rather than being doomed to repeating history.
The car was a tinny mess with wafer-thin doors and seats and a finish with such bad orange peel, the car should've been stamped "Sunkist!" It had a gutless 4-cylinder engine and a weird dashboard where ll the instruments were crammed into this skinny deep-recessed slot. Ads proclaiming the Celebrity as Chevrolet's new direction frightened me more than anything Stephen King could pen!
Thanks for correcting me on this. I think I was misled by the fact that Motor Trend featured a Celebrity on the cover of one of its issues at around the time that model was introduced, so I'm guessing it may have been the September, October, November or December '81 issue. Anyway, in that issue MT praised the Celebrity and described it as the right family car for the time, since it was space and fuel efficient, and featured front wheel drive.
We can criticize Motor Trend in hindsight, but if GM, and Ford and Chrysler too, for that matter, had delivered good quality, Motor Trend's evaluation of the GM A-bodies would have been reasonable. Let's remember that the superior reliability of the Japanese cars was not nearly as obvious in late '81 as it became later. Also, GM was recognized as a trail blazer in down sizing, while retaining interior space, as evidenced by the downsized '77 large bodies and the '78 intermediates. Converting the intermediates to FWD seemed a logical next step for achieving further gains in space and fuel efficiency.
On the plus side:
One time I got a call from a woman who said she was moving to a retirement home and needed to know the value of her old Mercedes, which "hadn't been driven in many years".
Well I was thinking..."yet another 1980s 4-door sedan with a frozen motor and chickens in the back seat"....
but lo and behold, what I saw when we opened her garage was a baby blue 190SL convertible, with 1971 license plates tags on it, the key still in the ignition, original untouched with about 80,000 miles on it, plus a factory hardtop.
The car needed restoration but was undamaged, unrusted and it looked like not one factory part had ever been changed. She had all the books, original bill of sale, all of it.
Anyway, I called a dealer friend--he came up, wrote her a check (quite generous I thought), picked the car up and it was sold back to Germany within a week. And I made a tidy commission. Lady happy, dealer happy, Shifty happy, car happy.
Another time I was called to appraise a collection of cars in a warehouse in Reno Nevada. While some of the cars were interesting, mostly they were old 20s and 30s American iron, and while a few were open cars, none were specialty coachwork or large-bore engines.
However, way in the back I spotted pieces of an unusual car....one fender, a grille, a trunk lid.
"What is that"? I asked.
"Oh, one of Dad's weird French cars I think. Do you think it has any value in that condition"?
"Is that all of it?"
"No, the rest is in another building, in boxes".
After examining the other parts, I suggested we try to bring it all together and kind of piece it up, to see what we have.
Well, turns out what we had was a 95% complete and correct Darl Mat Coupe, 1938... a custom built Peugeot 402 spports coupe by coachbuilder Pourtout.
My other fondest memory is a similar story, but from an attorney handling the estate of what was apparently a very eccentric (okay, CRAZY) car collector who had apparently run up $63,000 in storage fees on an MGTC!
So I found the car in a storage locker, and here again, it was unusual in that it was in bad shape, but all there, solid, and totally unmolested from factory new. And this one had racing badges from Pebble Beach way back when they raced there in the 1950s---so this car was one of the veterans of those days.
That one went back to the UK. It needed a complete restoration, and being a TC and not a Mercedes 190SL, I don't think one could have restored it in the USA and come out ahead---but in the UK, they are worth more and parts are more readily at hand---those rare bits that are so hard to find in America.
(actually, the car beside it is a very rare machine)
What was paid for the 190SL? And what happened to the Pug?
This is the closest barn find that I have come across: My elderly aunt in Califronia is in a nursing home (we're her only family), and her garage has a...drum roll.....
a banged up 1997 Mercury Tracer! Not really a barn find as I knew about the car when she was still driving it.
One of the coolest stires I read was in a 90s issue of Road & Track or Car and Driver about some Mercedes Benz from the war era in a eastern european barn, and how the "investors" smugglled it ouf of the country.
Apparently it was super rare like one of 10 ever made, I can't recall the details of the car's year or model, but I knew it was an older Mercedes.
2016 Audi A7 3.0T S Line, 2021 Subaru WRX
The 190SL? I'm not sure what the Germans paid for it---something like around $15,000---$20,000. In Germany, when restored, you can get $75K for one of those, or more depending (in Euros--to us it would be $100K). Of course, we are talking professional restoration of every little bit, not Johnny's Whack-A-Fender Malibu Restoration Service.
Yes, there's a lot of old junk in barns, too. Sometimes people let the cars go way too long, and basically they destroy what might have been saved.
The cars being let to rot for so long...I've seen that before, the stubborn old owner isn't poor enough to need to sell, but doesn't have the funds to revive the car. So, the car suffers, often to its death.
If so they gotta be as good as the resto shops in Germany.
2016 Audi A7 3.0T S Line, 2021 Subaru WRX
Good name
Commiecar 3/4 scale 1949 Chevy
"a recognized AACA Historical Preservation candidate"
This could be one too
White and cute
Not for the shy
Fanciful restoration claims, but didn't spend a few hundred bucks for the steering wheel...
70s futurism
Patina
The tires are a bit much
Where does this guy get all these things?
Flashy last ride
Why?
Uncommon
Fuselage preservation
And its richer identical cousin
Bleak days
Yet another from the king of malaise barges
51 Buick Roadmonster Sedan -- bid was a little light by about $1,000. $4K--4.5K should do it.
56 Desoto 4 dr -- good god man let it go for $20K if that's the bid. If you got your $26K, that would indeed be a HOME RUN. I would have bid $15K tops for it. Not bad lookin' for a 4Door though, I have to say.
58 Edsel Bermuda -- these can bring strong money, even as a #3 car like this one. I'm guessin' $25K on this one.
1958 Lancia Appia -- you know, if it weren't refrig white I'd be tempted at $4,600. These are such sweet little jewels, very well made cars. Had it only been that lovely slate gray with red interior, I would be *sorely* tempted. Check for rust, natch--we see many with crusty floors.
1978 Toyota Celica -- that'll run for another 200K miles.
Love the Edsel. It's amazing what they are going for. I'd still like a 58 convertible but there's no way on earth I could pay what one would bring.
1955 Firedome
I like that '56 DeSoto, but if I was gonna get a '56, I'd want a Fireflite. They were much more luxurious inside, and the headlight surrounds were more peaked than the Firedome, with a bit of a forward thrust. It made the car look less bug-eyed than the Firedome, or the 1955 models. I think $20K is crazy for something like that though.
As universally derided as the 1958 Edsel is, I have to profess a certain fondness for the bigger, Mercury-based models. I think that styling wears better on the bigger Mercury body than it does on the Ford.
1958 Lancia Appia S2- What a cool little car, going cheap so far.
1960 Caddy Hearse- That black beauty is in a lot better shape than the '76 Hearse we had at the radio station I worked at in the mid-'90s.
1977 AMC Hornet wagon- A surprising number of cars like it are still used as daily drivers by retirees living in AZ. I talked to a couple that had 288K on their Hornet wagon. :surprise:
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
2016 Audi A7 3.0T S Line, 2021 Subaru WRX
also a late 70's ford pickup.