The one I'm talking about is one my grandmother (God rest her soul) owned one just like this but silver.
This car actually seems pretty cool for a old full-size station wagon. With the Power Pack, it could output 200 hp from it's standard 287 cu. in. V8.
I've been thinking some more (because having a life is overrated) about all the things I've ranted about in this thread and some others I may not have, and I've realized something... you may have heard of "Sturgeon's Revelation", which is basically that 90% of everything is trash (with the corollary that 90% of consumers can't tell the difference between trash and non-trash), but I believe it's missing another corollary: 90% of non-trash will, given enough time, decay into trash, so even maintaining, let alone improving, the basic 90/10 proportion requires a continuous, conscious effort to produce new non-trash. When this is not done, you get a "dork age", or, basically, exactly what's happened to cars, roads, racing (of all kinds), car culture, culture in general, video games, action movies, music, and probably a lot of other things I couldn't think of over the last couple of decades. It even happens to individual roads. When Mulholland Drive was built back in the 1930s, it was expressly described as a "scenic byway for the road enthusiast". Now, depending on which section you're talking about, it's either a cop/racer battleground, a hiking trail, an upscale neighborhood, or a victim of erosion. The man who built it would probably be throwing up in his grave if he could see what's happened to it... and to the best of my knowledge, it was never replaced. See, that's probably why it's so hard to find good mountain roads now - the human population has grown exponentially in the past few decades, but the human road network hasn't. We just filled up all the existing spaces without taming any new ones. People like the man who designed and built Mulholland Drive, who have both the money and the inclination to build roads just to drive on, are few and far between, so most "good roads" exist to connect things like mines, lumber camps, and remote towns to civilization - but now, if you try to mine or log or connect a remote town to civilization, the green lobby will jump out of the woodwork and start crying, and everything will grind to a halt while everyone tries to work around said lobby's unreasonable demands. So we don't build new roads. We just sit around straightening and bypassing the ones we already have, or at least the ones that don't already have houses on them. The non-trash decays into trash, and no new non-trash replaces it. It happens with everything else too. Cars fall victim to bloat and feature creep, and when a lower-line model arrives to fill their former slot, it ends up being a phone booth on wheels with the approximate visual appeal of a pregnant spider. International GT racing flushes itself down the BoP toilet, with only the SCCA and maybe NASA left to remind people of when sanctioned racing was cool (oh by the way - this month's issue of Road & Track has a fawning profile of the guy who started that mess). Video games become corrupted with microtransactions and abusive DLC practices while the actual gameplay experience falls farther and farther down the priority list. Action movies have become parodies of themselves, substituting more and more violence and stupid camera work and general over-the-top-ness for actual acting and storytelling ability, which are clearly in short supply. In music, well, maybe there's some decent stuff kicking around, but the current fashion seems to be... bleeps and buzzes mashed together on a MacBook Pro. You know, when a guy who remixes Pokemon music comes out sounding better than most full-on original EDM producers, well, I don't want to take anything away from the talented remixer, but maybe the whole genre is flawed? That's even some of what I was getting at last night with my cracking on Toyota and Volkswagen for being insincere. They're not in the car business to shift the trash/non-trash ratio in favor of non-trash. They'll make anything that sells, even if they know it's trash. So when Toyota advertises a car as a street racer in a car-oriented publication while continuing to use their well-known "car you never have to think about" theme everywhere else, it makes the enthusiast-targeted marketing come off as fakey and cynical, especially in light of their withdrawal from video games, the end of all TRD supercharger production, and the fact that for several years they made no sports models at all. When Volkswagen is out tolling the bell for the ICE (in the most offensively unsubtle way possible, to boot) while simultaneously going record-hunting with it, that just comes off as blatantly hypocritical.
It was FWD and automatic-only, Car & Driver used one in the inaugural 24 Hours of LeMons, and the engine was a downsized Cadillac Northstar. Beyond that I know very little about it.
Well, when you put it like that... Say, if it uses a downsized Northstar, could you swap in a full-size one?
American take on the sports sedan segment. Could have been a great alternative to the Germans if it didn't look just like an overturned bathtub, but worse. Did they make it so ugly to scare the competition?
I kind of like them. They were supposed to be "cars of the future." I like them because they used the same design philosophy as 1950s and 1960s American classic cars.
Just seen this on Autotrader, not heard of them before, but a sexy looking car none the less. https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201810171585295?make=DE TOMASO
An Italian car company, founded by an Argentinian, giving their car a British-sounding name and putting American engines in it. That has to be the most confused car I've ever heard of.
Not only that, but in 2011 a certain Gian Mario Rossignolo tried to revive the brand with the following car... However, it was never put into production and Gian was charged with misusing €7.5mil of public money in the attempt to revive the brand. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/ita...omaso-chairman-arrested-idUSL6E8IC27120120712
I want to find a modern AWD car with manual that is not a performance car in the future. Any suggestions?