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

sda

fintail said:

I suspect they also can have electrical issues, and maybe even cooling system issues like later models. I know for early-mid 90s era MBs, the engine isn't the problem, it's the electrical things linked to it,

The same applies to VW/Audi. Electrical gremlins a plenty.

fintail

I'd take a 90s era BMW or MB over a same era VW/Audi any day.

sda said:

The same applies to VW/Audi. Electrical gremlins a plenty.

Mr_Shiftright

fintail said:

Out jogging today, spotted a very clean BMW E34 in white with factory chrome wheels. I was thinking to myself that these are much less common than W124s, and must be harder to live with. Very soon after, a W124 diesel purred down the street.

I don't think they enjoyed a particularly great reputation or a particularly bad one---they were glitchy and had a fair amount of cheap plastic that broke when you touched it or just fell off. But the engines were good.

ab348

@fintail - that assembly line pic is fabulous. I spot 4 old-timers: in Band 7, 5 cars back; in the next line is a pair 5 and 6 cars from the front, but the one that intrigues me most is at the far left, just under the Station 8 sign, what looks to be a white 280SE coupe? There seems to be another pair of oldsters to the far left of the red SL but it's hard to see.

fintail

Good eye. The door/window shape tells the story. If one zooms in the pic, they can see other fintails and some W108s there too. The white car you mention is a W111 coupe, I am not sure of the exact production start date of 280 cars, but it would be a 250SE or 280SE.

The partially covered car directly beside the SL is another big coupe or maybe even a cabrio. Behind it appears to be a couple covered fintails, then another SL, then the white coupe, then a W108. Also notice that the SLs are US models, with NA spec headlights and sidemarkers. I also note the new car beside the SL has non-body colored hubcaps - I suspect these were added for the pic, to dress up the car vs the stark look of basic black wheels. These cars would have had body color hubcaps, and I suspect they were shipped in the trunk rather than applied at the factory.

I have some reference books with assembly line pics, I should grab some images and share them sometime. I have this one I snipped from the internet years ago, it gives me a feeling from the assembly line in Christine:



There's also a cool fintail production video on Youtube, with accompanying groovy music (painting cars without a mask, nice). No date, but I suspect this is 1960-61:

https://youtu.be/QhTZMBr_lmg

ab348 said:

@fintail - that assembly line pic is fabulous. I spot 4 old-timers: in Band 7, 5 cars back; in the next line is a pair 5 and 6 cars from the front, but the one that intrigues me most is at the far left, just under the Station 8 sign, what looks to be a white 280SE coupe? There seems to be another pair of oldsters to the far left of the red SL but it's hard to see.

ab348

The music in that video is great. The painters wore coveralls and bonnets but no masks, wow. And the guy with the wet sander just did it without any eye or breathing protection either. Cool to see the 300SL going through the factory lot near the end.

fintail

The fintails coexisting with the roadsters is a good way to date it. There are also no coupes - those were introduced in 1961, and MB was quite proud of them, I have to imagine if they were in production, they would have been featured somewhere.

Here's another shot from what is likely the same day at the beginning of 1968 - some new cars with very convenient hubcap placement, a W108 in the air, and W108s and W110 fintails in the background:



MB was also proud of the W114/115, as it was the first completely new car without a basis in prior models. I think this pic is at Sindelfingen. I have been there before, it seems familiar.

ab348

For 1968 that factory looks very clean, bright and modern. My only visit to an auto assembly plant was the Olds Main plant in Lansing Mi in 1997 where they were building Pontiac Grand Ams and Buick Skylarks, and it was anything but. I think it was one of GM's oldest plants back then and even had ancient/original end-grain wood block floors in sections. Demolished a while ago.

fintail

80-90% of MB facilities were damaged or destroyed in the war. By 1960, most had been rebuilt and were modern. Today, they look the same outside, but have kept up inside, as Germans love automation and computer controls.

Mr_Shiftright

So if Detroit had been bombed, they would have made cars as good as Mercedes?

bhill2

Mr_Shiftright said:

So if Detroit had been bombed, they would have made cars as good as Mercedes?

I know a couple of people who owned Detroit cars of the ‘70s who would have gladly performed that experiment.

berri

LOL - Sad, but funny

omarman

The market says a lot about how 70's cars are valued today. Furrin and domestic.
I'm thinking this 1973 Mercedes was a $35K car when new and now the asking price is $9995.
That money won't even buy a rusty Bronco now.

uplanderguy

I preferred the bucket-seat Bonnevilles of the same era as the Holiday...not a lover of the body-colored wheelcovers. Pontiac didn't call those Bonnevilles a separate name, but whenever I'd see them (not often), I was reminded of sixties Grand Prixs, when still built on the full-size platform. And that was a good thing.

stickguy

4 door sedans rarely get any love in the classic market anyway.

fintail

I've actually seen that argument made in a roundabout way. Of course, that doesn't explain the troublesome MBs that have existed over the years, or the good cars made in Detroit. But facts don't matter to some people.

Mr_Shiftright said:

So if Detroit had been bombed, they would have made cars as good as Mercedes?

fintail

Nice looking car, and that price is top of the market for one with those issues (repaint, "little to no rust" = some rust, typical mpg and maintenance of MB V8s of the era, etc). Best year for W116 for the bumpers and simple emissions. Great color combo, too.

Base MSRP of a 450SEL in 1973 was $15904.

This green MB brought less than 7K at auction in 2009 - and even today, anything more than 10K would be a gift to the seller.

omarman said:

The market says a lot about how 70's cars are valued today. Furrin and domestic.
I'm thinking this 1973 Mercedes was a $35K car when new and now the asking price is $9995.
That money won't even buy a rusty Bronco now.

fintail

Out on the road this morning saw a GMC Typhoon, 80s era angular Subaru GL, early 80s El Camino.

ab348

In a town about an hour away from here, a '57 Pontiac 2-door sedan (called a "coach" here back then), 2-tone, not restored, lots of patina, with 2 guys who could have been members of ZZ Top in it.

uplanderguy

It's funny you mentioned the Lansing Olds plant, ab348. The one longtime contributor to the Studebaker Drivers' Club magazine has mentioned that his parents, California farmers who were longtime Studebaker owners, had to swallow hard to consider a Canadian Studebaker after Dec. '63, but that they toured the Hamilton, Ontario plant while traveling and found the plant and staff "a direct contrast to their recent visit to the Lansing Oldsmobile plant". He wasn't specific, but I was always curious about that. They ended up buying a new '65 Cruiser from their longtime hometown dealer.

I toured the Lordstown GM plant a couple times. It opened in 1966 but has been massively revamped a couple or more times since. I wanted to go through it last year during their 50th anniversary celebration but there were 10K people waiting to get in, sigh. I did go to their classic car show the following day. I had forgotten just how enormous that place is. You're driving in the country, with little houses, go over a hill and it's like the Emerald City. I actually had to stop and ask a security guard where the car show was; it wasn't evident to me.

Along with suppliers, definitely a major employer of people between where I live, where I grew up, and the 70 miles in-between.

ab348

The Olds Main plant was one of those huge old red-brick plants built in the 1920s and GM kept it going until the early 2000s. It, along with the newer (1960s) and quite handsome Olds administration building was all razed or mothballed in the mid to late 2000s after Olds was phased out. It was something to see but not necessarily in a good way. It was several floors high and we didn't get to see all of those but the parts we did see were educational. I was there as part of the Olds centennial in 1997 and while tours of the place were normally not done they made an exception for a group of us.

For years it was where the majority of Oldsmobiles were made but by this time they weren't making any, just the Grand Am and Skylark. The place was so large that by then lots of it simply was not being used. The assembly line area where the cars were made was newer than a lot of the surrounding parts of the building but didn't really have the look of what was in those M-B pics. Lots of the surrounding spaces were dark, untouched and out of bounds. Others were used for storage of pallet loads of parts awaiting use. These were the areas with the wooden-block floors which I had never seen before but later learned were quite common in factories and other industrial buildings the first part of the 20th century thanks to the forests of northern Michigan and beyond. Sort of like large wooden bricks stacked on end.

The assembly itself wasn't exactly Mercedes-clean either. As we went along the line we saw that it was organized into small group areas of workers. Each group handled a few stations where things were added to the car. The group area had wooden picnic tables like you'd see in a campsite where radios would be playing, workers would eat, drink and smoke when they weren't getting up to install something on a car, etc. It was all rather bizarre and not at all what I expected. The other thing that struck me was that control over parts seemed loose at best. I dunno if people were checked on their way out the door at the end of a shift but we certainly weren't, and we could have pocketed any number of things if we were so inclined. I picked up a stereo from a stack that were awaiting installation and nobody said anything (I put it back BTW). It all seemed quite casual.

The other thing I remember is watching the cars at the end of the line being driven on a set of rollers. Man, did the drivers get on those cars hard! Engines screaming with lots of smoke and fumes from them being started and getting hot for the first time. They weren't very gentle with them when they drove them off the rollers and out of the plant either. So much for a gentle break-in period.

I was inside this building and it's a shame it is gone. I got one of the white bricks from it when they were taken down. The lobby was really impressive. I can say that I got to use the washroom in it.

uplanderguy

I remember watching new Chevys being driven off delivery trucks at my hometown Chevy dealer where I about lived through my teen years. Boom, bang, off the truck, then full-throttle towards the one building where someone at the dealer would check them in.

Interesting about the Lansing plant. Had the parents of the fellow I mentioned ever toured the U.S. Studebaker assembly plants in South Bend, they'd probably have been less-impressed than Hamilton, Ontario, which had only been built during the war. Studebaker was still using certain buildings in 1963 where they had built carriages and Conestoga wagons a century earlier!

The multi-story body plant in South Bend is nearly done being remodeled and repurposed as a technology hub and has some clients moving in already. I saw it in May and it looks very cool from the outside. I sure prefer seeing that kind of thing over the usual concept of just 'tear down and start from scratch'.

Mr_Shiftright

omarman said:

The market says a lot about how 70's cars are valued today. Furrin and domestic.
I'm thinking this 1973 Mercedes was a $35K car when new and now the asking price is $9995.
That money won't even buy a rusty Bronco now.

Nobody really wants those things except maybe some old clockmaker in Switzerland whose father had one---they are troublesome, gas hungry and expensive to repair, and though well-built, too new to look old, and too old to look new.

You can restore them, re-upholster them, re-paint them, store them in a hermetically sealed vault for 20 years, and the market doesn't care---it's $5000 bucks all day long, The market graph is one big flatline.

The later 450SEL with the 6.9 would bring better money.

omarman

fintail said:

Nice looking car, and that price is top of the market for one with those issues (repaint, "little to no rust" = some rust, typical mpg and maintenance of MB V8s of the era, etc). Best year for W116 for the bumpers and simple emissions. Great color combo, too.

Base MSRP of a 450SEL in 1973 was $15904.

This green MB brought less than 7K at auction in 2009 - and even today, anything more than 10K would be a gift to the seller.

omarman said:

The market says a lot about how 70's cars are valued today. Furrin and domestic.
I'm thinking this 1973 Mercedes was a $35K car when new and now the asking price is $9995.
That money won't even buy a rusty Bronco now.

Ha! I was thinking about a 70's 450 SEL which was more than that but when I looked back at an old 1977 C&D article it was the 450 SEL 6.9 which they tested at $38K. Different story there! Mercedes Unleashes the Potent 6.9! Just as they're closing the gas station.

Quoting, "Next morning, into New Mexico. I put it on 110 for about an hour, feels so good that I edge up to 120, then 130 (indicated). Engine note is meaner, harder, and wind noise increases, otherwise no clue that we’re going that fast. Suddenly magnetic CB antenna blows off with a bang."

uplanderguy

Very neat pic of Olds headquarters; thanks for posting. I'd never seen that building before.

I did work a week in Kalamazoo in 1982 or so. I never saw so many Checkers in my life, including ones with vinyl tops and wire wheelcovers.

The Olds building reminds me of the tour I, my hometown dealer friend, and his son took of the empty Studebaker Administration Building in South Bend in 2012. Other than peeling paint inside, the executive offices and washroom were still pretty neat, as were all the doorknobs with "S" on them and the mural of transportation history that went around the inside wall of the fourth floor.

The lobby was supposedly remodeled in 1961 and it looked like it. There was an old red phone with no dial on a counter there. My friend's son picked it up and said, "Is this the President? Filer from Pennsylvania here. We're on our way up". You had to be there, but we all got a good chuckle out of it.

fintail

Yep, a 6.9 looks the same, but is a different animal. The engine and suspension probably cost the price difference, not to mention a few years of bad inflation and a weakening dollar. A 6.9 is worth a lot more now, and will cost a quite bit more to keep on the road. An engine or suspension rebuild has to be insanely expensive. I can't imagine restoring one, but they do it in Europe.

Funny thing about the prices. I have a couple of 1976 KBB and NADA guides. Had one bought the right model (coupes and convertibles especially), it would have been no problem to buy a new MB, keep it 3-5 years, and have it be worth the original MSRP or sometimes a little more. Inflation and currency issues made it a wacky market.

omarman said:

Ha! I was thinking about a 70's 450 SEL which was more than that but when I looked back at an old 1977 C&D article it was the 450 SEL 6.9 which they tested at $38K. Different story there! Mercedes Unleashes the Potent 6.9! Just as they're closing the gas station.

Quoting, "Next morning, into New Mexico. I put it on 110 for about an hour, feels so good that I edge up to 120, then 130 (indicated). Engine note is meaner, harder, and wind noise increases, otherwise no clue that we’re going that fast. Suddenly magnetic CB antenna blows off with a bang."

fintail

Out on the road, saw a couple of 80s era 911s, a rubber baby buggy bumper MG Midget, and a ~67 Camaro convertible in a nice metallic blue (I didn't notice side markers, but it was moving)

roadburner

Here are some shots from the BMW Manufacturing plant in Greer, SC; I took them in 2015 when I was covering the World Introduction of the F16 X6:

fintail

Today in traffic, a clean BMW E38, early 80s Subaru wagon

berri

68 or 69 (second version without huge glass rear window) Plymouth Barracuda. Looked like a daily driver. Didn't really see a lot of those when they were new.

Mr_Shiftright

'54 Chrysler 2D HT...very nice, two-tone green, with a V8 rumble. Those were really good cars and beautifully built.

sda

I've seen this GMC on the road and it looks sharp. Unfortunately not a good picture, but it does look clean.

stickguy

I really like that generation of El Camino. Would not mind one as a toy. A nice tweaked 350 with a 5 speed, and good to go.

ab348

Unfortunately one of those caught on fire at a stoplight not far from my home today:

PF_Flyer

Going for obscure here. I know *I* couldn't have even guessed at what this is, but I saw it in a documentary and thought it would be an interesting brain teaser for the group

stickguy

Super early Toyota?

Michaell

stickguy said:

Super early Toyota?

Actually, the plate looks to be Korean - early Hyundai?

PF_Flyer

You're both close to the right ballpark (ooo.. ballpark might work as a hint). It's also the first "luxury" car from this manufacturer

ab348

http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/HERITAGE/nissan_passenger_car.html

PF_Flyer

There ya go. 1937 Nissan Model 70

imidazol97

Wow. Looks like a US model. Is it a copy of something?

stickguy

I read the write up with the picture. They bought the tooling from IICR Pearce something.

fintail

Graham-Paige. I think the Soviet ZIS 101 was also based on a Graham-Paige

PF_Flyer

imidazol97 said:

Wow. Looks like a US model. Is it a copy of something?

The documentary I was watching was talking about Japan in 1937 being the first industrialized country in Asia, and Nissan introducing their first luxury car, with plans to export them to Austrailia. Since we've been driving Nissans since 1979, I'd be curious to actually see one of these. Whenever I sit in a different Nissan model, they sort of have the same feel/layout in general terms. Would be interesting to see how a 1937 Nissan compared to a 1937 Ford or Chevy.

If you want to see the segment in the documentary, go to the 3:30 mark of the video. Sort of looks like a commercial/promotional film. Cars driving by, pretty girls looking at the car, etc. Very "western".

fintail

I am pretty sure Ford had a branch plant or built under license setup in Japan around 1930. Also had one in the USSR at the same time, making model As. Pics of Moscow in the early 30s have numerous Model As.

Mr_Shiftright

Lots of cross pollination with Austin as well.

PF_Flyer

From my flippin' thru and stoppin' on it movie of last night

kyfdx

Love the 260/280Z with the louvers..

PF_Flyer

It was an odd mashup of different vehicles in the movie.

explorerx4

China Syndrome?