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What Classic/Collectible car couldn't someone GIVE to you?
Mr_Shiftright
Member Posts: 64,481
in General
Is there a car so uninteresting or repulsive, or so....so...frictionally irritating to every fiber of your being, or...so....so humiliating for you to drive that you couldn't bear it (I have car issues like that) that I couldn't give you a free, running one?
These can also be TYPES of cars, like rat rods, flatbed trucks, etc.
RULES: It's a car you'd have to promise to keep or return to me when you're done with it. You can't take it and sell it, no, you can't.
These can also be TYPES of cars, like rat rods, flatbed trucks, etc.
RULES: It's a car you'd have to promise to keep or return to me when you're done with it. You can't take it and sell it, no, you can't.
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Some 70s style hot rods of classic cars - hacked up Packards, Cords, etc can irk me. But for the most part I am pretty accepting of most cars.
You no like little VW bugs? I'd take one. At least I could fix it myself.
I don't hate Beetles...one could make a decent town car, I'd prefer an oval with some period accessories, or maybe even a split, just to be unusual.
Renault LeCar
Simca
Honda 600
Pinto
Vega
Corvair
Chevette
Vega
Saab 99
Chevy II
Yugo
Regards:
Oldbearcat
I'd probably rule out most small, old-school subcompacts like the Pinto, Vega, Chevette, 70's Civic and Accord, etc, because by todays' standards they're simply too small, too fragile, and too slow, and I'd just feel vulnerable.
And if it's anything that's typecast as a chick car, like a Miata, VW Eros, Cabriolet, Mary Kay pink Cadillac, etc, I probably wouldn't go for it, either.
Oh, and any of those horrible neoclassic revivals that were all the rage in the 70's...Packard, Stutz, and so on.
I think the one little misfit from that era I might be willing to put up with is the Pacer, if it has a 304 at least, and not the 6-cyl. And, in later years, those little Spirits weren't bad looking cars...much nicer than the Gremlin, at least!
I'd flat out reject any old Jaguar XJ or 1970s-80s Rolls-Royce. Those cars are the automotive equivalent of a "white elephant." I'd also flat out reject any Diesel or HT4100 Cadillac.
I'd even be willing to put up with one of those, if it were in half-way decent condition, and free. Just make sure to junk it the second something major goes wrong with it.
Some of those Euros would be financial suicide, but if someone else could eat any big bills, I'd take one too. Mint condition Rolls Silver Spur in blue like in Cannonball Run II? I've always loved that exact car, so yes.
All you get initially is an offer for a free, good-running, decent looking car.
So do you want an old 70s era Rolls Royce or don't you.
If it truly has been kept up and doesn't need a brake overhaul, interior, isn't rusty etc, and it is nice colors...I could risk it.
I like those bustleback Sevilles, but I think the only one I'd want would be a 1980, which had the Caddy 368. I might chance an '81 with the V-8-6-4, as I hear it's easy to disable the cylinder deactivation.
And, they do!
A shop I knew called them that because like lawn chairs, they usually just sat around, not running.
AMEN!
At the risk of being sacrificed to the Automotive Gods...Frankly I wouldn't take many of the Italian exotics (Lamborghini, Maserati, Ferrari) either. Beautiful to look at, thrilling to drive (probably), BUT, I think I would look like a complete Poseur in most of them, and I wouldn't have the stomach to maintain them. A guy in my old neighborhood used to drive a Lambo around, it just looked so ridiculously over-the-top and out-of-place in our quiet middle class neighborhood. It would be like Barney Fife relocating the Taj Mahal into Mayberry...
THAT is one I wouldn't take!
I wouldn't take one of those Shay Reproduction Model A's either.
Maybe a late one in the right color in super condition but I doubt it.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Actually, I would LOVE to take that to Corvette shows and concours...see how many people I can piss off. Act like it is a sacred work of art.
Thinking about cars I wouldn't want, that Lancia mention makes me think...I don't want anything that will routinely leave me stranded...like a 70s Lancia.
The really scary part is that they made 50 of these things... :sick:
For styling, I never liked the Pinto or Gremlin. Never liked the Maverick or Hornet sedans. Dislike the 1970 Dodge Coronet (although would take a performance version, just to sell it!).
Other than that, I think I'd 'take' anything else in good condition.
Regards:
Oldbearcat
Heck, I'd be happy with just 40 cents per mile. My '85 Silverado got about 8.5 mpg on the last tank. And fuel is around $4.00 per gallon now, so I'm looking at around 47 cents per mile for the gas for that thing! Needless to say, it doesn't get driven much, and mostly short-trip driving, which probably helps contribute to that crappy mpg.
A lot of those old musclecars are really over-rated as daily drivers though. They usually had no air conditioning, a minimum of other options, short gearing which meant they sounded like they were screaming even when idling along, and those big, powerful engines put off a lot of heat, great for cooking you on a hot summer day when you're stuck in traffic. And, for all that inconvenience, most decent V-6 family cars would still take you in 0-60 or the quarter mile.
So, I think I'd rather have, say, a nicely equipped Coronet with a/c and just a 318 or base level 383, than an R/T or Superbee with a 426 or high-output 440.
I'd imagine that most compacts with the tiniest engines probably sucked back then. A 4-cyl Chevy II is pretty lame, but I don't think I'd want a Valiant or Lancer/Dart with the smaller 170 slant six, either! And the same goes for a Falcon or Comet with the 144 or 170 CID 6-cyl engines.
I used to own a 1969 Dodge Dart GT hardtop with the 225 slant six, and I liked it alot. Roomy up front, comfortable, adequate performance, and good gas mileage. It would get around 15-18 mpg around town an 22 or so on the highway, even with the a/c cranked up. When it got wrecked, I bought a '68 that had a 318. Gas mileage sucked...best I ever did was maybe 17.5 on the highway, and local it was more like 12-13, 14 if I was lucky. But the performance of that V-8 more than made up for the mileage loss! :shades:
It used to get between 12-14 MPG when I bothered to check it.
My 1965 Riviera was good for about 10 MPG if I didn't jump on it too much.
I think the 64 Bonneville I had got about 10. I had a '65 Cadillac that I could stretch to about 14. I remember driving cross country in a friends '63 Chrysler New Yorker with 383 and we got 13 mpg all the way.
Not to get too nitpicky, but a '63 NYer should have a ~350 hp 413 standard. Unless it had blown and was replaced with a 383?
I briefly had a '67 Newport with a 383-2bbl, a fairly wussy 270 hp unit, I believe. I never drove it enough to get a feel for fuel economy, though.
But over time it got kind of tricky to follow the Chrysler/Imperial car line. My uncle Allen drove a Chrysler Imperial in the early 70s with the standard 440/4bbl engine. I've read that it's not proper to call it, "Chrysler" Imperial -- just Imperial. But it was advertised as a Chrysler Imperial back then.
By the early 80s my dad was driving a Chrysler LeBaron which used to be the name of an Imperial trim line. I remember it had the Imperial eagle emblem somewhere on it -- maybe hood ornament. Oh yes and a 225 slant six engine under the hood!
After my uncle passed away, my older brother bought the Imperial battleship and drove it every day to work. While at the same time my retired dad, raised during the depression era, drove his downsized Imperial-badged LeBaron. That always looked funny to me.
Between those two cars, if I had to decide which one would I could NOT accept, keep forever, tow it, repair it, etc...I'd probably turn away the Imperial battleship. It was just too much everything but I suppose that was the intent back then.
Yeah, technically they were simply "Imperials" from 1955-75. But, often the badge would read "Imperial" with "by Chrysler" underneath in a smaller script, or something like that.
I think one sore spot for the Imperial is that it always had the same engine as the New Yorker, yet was supposed to be a more prestigious car. Over the years, the Imperial and New Yorker became closer in size and price. For 1976-78, what had been the Imperial was now the New Yorker Brougham. In some of those earlier years though, an Imperial could be an easy 600-800+ heavier than a New Yorker, and using the same engine, that HAD to hurt performance.
Now that I think about it, a slant six anything made after 1979 would probably be a hard sell for me. In 1979, the 1-bbl had 100 hp, and there was a 2-bbl version that put out 110. But for '80 it was cut to 85 hp, with only a 1-bbl carb. It had to struggle so hard to move those heavy cars that most of the time, if you bought the 318 instead, you actually got BETTER fuel economy!
It bounced back slightly, to 90 hp for 1981, and I think that's where it stood until 1987 or whenever it was finally replaced by the 3.9 V-6. And by then it was a truck-only engine.
Still, if it was in decent shape and the carb wasn't too finicky, I could put up with a slant six Diplomat or LeBaron, if it was free! I'd hate to think of that over-worked '85-90 hp engine in something like an '80-81 Newport, St. Regis, or Gran Fury though.
Regards:
Oldbearcat
Wow, so if a Newport was guzzling like that, I hate to think of how much a New Yorker with a 413 would have swallowed down!
The few times I had taken my '57 DeSoto on a highway run, it would get around 16 mpg. Which, I guess, is fairly reasonable. At around two tons, it weighs about as much as my '76 LeMans, '67 Catalina, and '79 New Yorker (base weight of all three is within around 60 lb of each other). Yet with a 341 Hemi, it actually has less displacement than the others (400 for the Catalina, 360 for the NYer, and while they called it a 350, the LeMans has 353 cubes if you do the math).
The Catalina has done as well as 17, while the LeMans has come close to 18, and the New Yorker gotten around 21. None of them would do that consistently though, and to get those kind of figures, it almost has to be a pure highway run (i.e., fill up, get on the highway, and don't stop again until the next fill-up)
I always thought it a bit odd that my '67 Catalina and '68 Dart would both get around 17 mpg on the highway. Despite the fact that the Catalina had about 800 lb, and 82 cubes, and an extra pair of carb jets compared to the Dart.
But, in local driving, the Catalina could easily drop to 9-10, while the Dart was more like 12-13.
My LeMans and New Yorker can easily drop to 9-10 mpg, too!
To get a 2-ton square brick moving takes energy! Once it's moving, not so much, unless you go fast enough to hit the aero wall. Then things get ugly quickly.
Come to think of it , a BMW 740 would be the same-huge repair costs when something goes wrong.
AS for SAAB (the newest of the automotive world's walking dead)-will sed SAABs be worth anything? I heard that the Chinese willrescue them, but I cannot see the brand surviving long.
Very few Audis are worth saving---the Quattro 5000 wagons do catch people's eye, and the Audi 5000 GT Turbo coupe is a minor collectible.