You’re probably right. A couple of years ago, I had a chance to drive one of these.
A wonderful car for cruising on a sunny spring day, but my old Maxima would have easily beat it point to point on any even slightly curved road in the state.
The real genius of both of those cars was how smooth the ride is at high speed on your average 1970’s American back road.
One thing about the 80s I miss are vehicle themed shows. Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider, Air Wolf. Even more with movies.
Granted it was a lot of cheese, but as a kid it was pretty cool. You could not be a kid back in the day and not ramp your Hot Wheels off of dirt mound screaming “Yeeee-Haaaswwww!”
That’s the great thing about old cars…as much as anything they have their own personality that endears them to their owners more than their performance or handling. An old Corvette is shit compared to modern cars but you can’t deny that it has a certain je ne sais quoi that just puts a smile on your face.
My dad had a 67 250SL much like the one below. I learned to drive in that car. It wasn’t particularly fast and you could barely see over the long hood…but man!..there was no greater feeling than driving down the road with the top down and growl of the engine. And the looks you get from strangers…incredible!!
Unfortunately, it got car cancer (rust) really bad and eventually became dangerous to drive. Happily, he sold it to a neighbor who did a ground up restoration so I still get to see it from time to time. This is on the top of my list to buy with my lottery winnings.
I’ve been in a car or two where you could see the road through the floor boards…
Throw in Rockford Files’ Firebird for kicks and giggles, the car was a big feature of the show. I grew up thinking that car was the shit. Now I watch that show and while I still think it’s attractive it looks like it drives like total garbage.
Theme music wasn’t so bad either. I grew up on that stuff. It was said (in the whispered corners of large rooms) that my dad was a dead ringer for James Garner.
As young adults, my friends and I would play cards and watch Dukes of Hazzard. We’d laugh at the cheese, and gawk reverently at Catherine Bach.
I seem to remember reading somewhere (or watching, it’s been quite a while) that each car jump in that series totaled the car that was used. Toward the end of the series, they started using scale models (and gods, it showed) because they didn’t have the budget to keep buying a new car for each and every stunt jump.
My parents had a VW Rabbit when i was growing up that had this “feature”. The worst part is that we lived on a dirt road so if it was raining your pants would get muddy.
Somehow they managed to find a used car dealer that would buy it from them so they could upgrade to a base model first generation Plymouth Voyager minivan (with the underpowered engine and manual transmission). I heard later that the car effectively snapped in half when the dealer tried to fix it up for resale.
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