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Classic Cars I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today!
17960 messages, Last post on Nov 27, 2009 at 6:08 PM
You are in the Classic Cars Forum. Your Host is mr_shiftright
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jan 03, 2009 4:30 am) 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! |
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jan 04, 2009 6:44 am) |
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"Actually, the Camaro Z28 was Car of the Year in 1982." 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. |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 02, 2009 12:35 pm)
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 04, 2009 12:06 pm) 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.
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 04, 2009 1:43 pm)  (actually, the car beside it is a very rare machine) What was paid for the 190SL? And what happened to the Pug? |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 04, 2009 1:43 pm) 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. |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 04, 2009 1:43 pm) 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. |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 05, 2009 11:12 am) 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.
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Replying to: fintail (Jan 05, 2009 11:22 am) If so they gotta be as good as the resto shops in Germany.
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