The non-muscle American car thread (READ THE OP)

  • Thread starter The87Dodge
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In your opinion, which country makes the best looking cars?

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    195
Hemming and hawing about nominating this for the TV car thread, but as cool as it is, I just don't think it's significant enough.

Purported to be a Grand National on the show, the general consensus is that it's definitely a Regal and it might be a T-Type...but not actually a GN.

It appeared on NBC's crime drama Life, driven by the lead.

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I dig the striping.
 
Loving those Buicks. Wheelmansteve's dad retired from Buick, and I grew up driving all the mid 80's dreck. The odd T-Type or GN that made it home as a weekend company loaner was a treat. There was a deep dark core of actual car engineers holed up somewhere in Flint, fighting the good fight against all the fake wire hubcaps, padded vinyl tops, and coach lights.
 
Populuxe Cowboy
In the late '70s, if you had a subcompact as dull as the flavorless mush called rootmarm, then there was only one option: put in portholes and slather on the graphics. I give you the 1977-1979 Ford Pinto Cruising Wagon. And I love it unconditionally.






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Theres someone in my neighborhood with one of these, It's in a very, very metallic green. I kinda have a soft spot for them.
 
Spitfiredwod
Theres someone in my neighborhood with one of these, It's in a very, very metallic green. I kinda have a soft spot for them.
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You need to take a picture of it and post it to the “have you seen anything nice today?” thread.
 
More big two-doors. These ran on the FWD GM H Platform which was in production from 1986 to 1999. These two coupes were only offered for a few years, from 1986 to about 1991. There was a third car on this platform, the Pontiac Bonneville, but it was never offered as a coupe. I think the design holds up very well, especially the LeSabre T-Type below.


Buick LeSabre


Oldsmobile Delta 88
 
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A few weeks back I saw an '87-8 Delta 88 (alas, it was a more-door) with those super cool Super Stock steelies in the FWD offset that were used on the '88-down Cutlass Ciera and Cutlass Cruiser; I had no idea they saw duty on the H-body as well.

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They're body color matched, which one would think would indicate they're Super Stock IIIs, but near as I can tell, Oldsmobile simply referred to them as Super Stock without a number designation. Oh and Christ on a bike was it hard to find a decent picture of a car with them.

Until the FWD variant came out, there were two steel wheels in that style--the Super Stock II and the body color matched (or Hurst highlighted in the case of Hurst cars) Super Stock III. These are the wheels that are so commonly associated with Cutlasses but they were equipped on the full range, with nifty caps that covered the wheel lugs on big cars.

The Super Stock I was another style entirely (Cragar-esque, if I'm picturing it accurately), and the brief Super Stock IV was a polycast.

I think I need to do a deep dive into polycasts over in the wheels thread.

...

Have a Luxury Le Mans. Yes, that's what it was called.

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And yes, those are fender skirts.
 
Reminds me of the 1989-1991 Mercury Cougar XR-7. Same platform and supercharged V6 as the T-Bird, but more grown-up looking. These could go from 0-60mph in the low 7s with the 5-speed manual. After '91 the 3.8L V6 was dropped and the 5.0L V8 was used instead, making 10 less horsepower.

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When I was a kid, I lived in Maine on a pretty large piece of property. My parents were the type to discard vehicles on the land when they were no longer in use (:lol:) - at one point the non-operational fleet consisted of:

3x Peugeot 504 (one green diesel, one red gas, one brown diesel wagon that burned to nothing)
2x Peugeot 505 (one silver wagon, one gold sedan)
1x Series 1 Land Rover
1x Opel Manta (yes, believe it)
1x AMC Eagle SX4

The AMC Eagle was "mine" and I loved it. Even looking back, what a cool car they are, especially in SX4 trim. A car way ahead of it's time, despite it's meager underpinnings. It was the probably the last bit of innovation that AMC brought forth before they disappeared.

There are so few of them left its hard to even find a decent picture of them:
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They definitely did some racing too:

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Sadly I don't think I have any pictures of mine, but it was silver with black accents.

Contemporary review:
 
GranTurNismo
Why do the plates say '78 then?
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Could be the "1978" on the plates doesn't actually refer to the model year or perhaps they aren't the car's plates. Could be the model year is reflected in the plates and those plates are correct, but the car's year has been misrepresented.

A number of changes were made for the 1980 model year and, unless the car was extensively modified to look like a few years newer, it's not a '78.

Here's a '78 (with the same wheels and lug caps, as it happens) for comparison:

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Edit: There may be a case for the car not being an '81 specifically, however it appears to be the case at first blush and without being familiar with every model year change, plus the Mecum lot listing reflects that particular model year.
 
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