1970s "model interiors" genuinely fascinating, horrible

I think it was a pretty good decade for sports cars in general.

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You mean that such nice, social people are forced by economic circumstance to live in a home with a tiny kitchen?

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Aw, I can’t see the hideous photos because it’s on Gawker. :-/

That Lincoln Continental in the middle? The '78 four door? I had a mint green one with dark green Naugahyde interior I inherited from my grandfather.

Great car.

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It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction with this thread.

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“Monte Carlo” gives me memories of my first car: a '79 Monte Carlo.

It was a truly terrible car: an old family car, I got it as a first car rather than my parents getting the $10 or whatever they’d get for trade-in. When Dad first got it, he changed it from straight beighe to a beige-brown two-tone paint scheme that became a factory option the next year.

It had the dubious disctinction of having a 267 Chevy engine, the second-lowest displacement of a Chevy V8 iirc. The cams wore out and Dad and one of his mechanic friends ground down a Crane cam to work on the thing. It was the worst of all worlds. It would die at stoplights unless I revved the thing, it would idle at about 40 mph, but literally couldn’t break the tires loose on wet pavement.

The guy who bought it from me was glad to get it, though; he had a Chevy 350 ready to go, and as it turns out, the automatic transmission on the thing allowed a person to more or less drop in the 350 as a replacement.

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Stylistically, early 70s muscle cars are better grouped with mid-to-late 1960s design. 70s design is better represented by the boxy examples @IronEdithKidd references, and that continued pretty much up until the Ford Taurus (which, if you remember, looked like a space-age bubble car back then.)

And I don’t care what anyone says, Gremlins are cool.

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The biggest problem with most of these is the awful lighting in the photography. I guess they hadn’t invented diffusion yet? In real-world lighting things would look much better.

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I totally remember that. Julia must have made it on TV. We had brown ones

Bitchin AMC

Also…

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Aaaah, the Austin Allegro’s bodybuilding older brother.

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The Taurus was introduced in '86.

AMC made some serious cars in the 70s. The Javelin, based on the AMX, was a regular race winner, and a popular choice by police departments because it was fast and robust. The fact that we remember AMC for the Gremlin and Pacer is very sad, like remembering the Carter family for Billy.

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Yes, re-read my comment. What we think of as 1970s design cues lasted well into the 80s. The 1986 Taurus was the threshold.

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Gotcha. I read that as “70s design continued to the Taurus” rather than “cars following 70s design continued…”

BTW, my daily driver is a car from '86, but it is a 60s design (an Alfa Spider).

How did home interior examples morph into a discussion about cars?



And we liked it!

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This could have been our bathroom growing up…

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oh the fridge and stove that came with the house were that middle color… so glad they are gone now.

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Aesthetically dubious perhaps, but some parts were fun.

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