The cover of the brochure called it “Pontiac’s sporty new mid-sized car.”But it was a bit of a stretch a few pages later, when this 1973 Pontiac LeMans Sportwas described as a “2-door Colannade Hardtop.” Yes, it did have two doors, the top was hard, and it featured GM’s new Colannade styling, but in the automotive world of the 20thcentury, a 2-door hardtop was t
This 1940 Ford Coupemay not have had the new-for-1940 grille of the Deluxe models, but it still had a Ford V8 engine under the hood. Ford had a practice of using the previous year’s front clip on its standard lineup for a few years, and it always confused the heck out of me. In the brochure they told us that the Coupe“…carries three with even greater ease [than the sedan], since
If you’re face-to-face with a 1963 Studebaker Avanti, odds are you’re at a car show or in a museum. But every once in a while you come across one in the wild, like this one, seen a few weeks ago in a Lockportparking lot. The Avanti was certainly one of the more stunningly designed American cars of 1963, but a series of production problems led to only 3,834 of them being produced in thi
Remember when theHonda Insight (c2000)was brand new? I do (I test drove one) and I also remember thinking to myself “Oh my God, all hybrid cars are going to be weird-looking.” Well, that turned out not to be the case. But I still think it holds true for this car. Futuristic? Yes. But the future wasn’t here yet back in November 1999 when the Insight debuted. Sold for model years 2
The Ford-Chevrolet rivalry went on for decades, but readers born since the advent of the internet might not even be aware that this was ever a thing. The two automakers were at the top of the U.S. sales heap for years, with Chevy finally taking off with the title (not counting pickup trucks, of course!) back in the 1960s. For a while, anyway. When this 1937 Chevrolet Mastercoupe was new, Ford was
Saw this 1984 Toyota Celica Supraa couple of summers ago at a Sunday car show in the Village of Kenmore. The Supra started life in 1978 in Japan as the Celica Supra, essentially a more luxe, six-cylinder version of the Celica. Today’s RealRideis from that car’s second-generation, which was introduced for MY 1982 and lasted through 1986. The third-gen car was a bit late to the starting
This 1962 Olds F-85 Cutlassmarks the second year forone of Olds’ most successful nameplates. Introduced the year before as a top-of-the-line Club Coupe only, for MY 1962 the Cutlass lineup expanded to include a convertible. By the middle of the decade it would also include sedans, hardtops, & wagons, and by the end of the decade the Cutlass line would be Olds’ biggest-selling namep
This 1939 Packard Sixis still getting a workout. Notice the kayak racks in place. In some circles these cars are referred to as the Packard One-Ten, but all of the literature I’ve seen uses the Six moniker, which differentiates it from the Eight & Twelve series of cars. One ad told us how the ’39 Packards had been voted as America’s handsomest car in an unbiased national surv
Chevy told us that the 1976 Chevelle Laguna Type S-3was “The Sportiest Chevelle.”If nothing else, it appears to have been the Chevelle with the longest model designation. A couple of things immediately made the S-3 stand out from the other Chevelles: “…an aerodynamically styled urethane ‘soft’ front end that [told] anyone watching you’re not about to go t
Came across this 1989 Cadillac Eldoradoa few weeks ago while bicycling through Kenmore. This was from (according to Wikipedia) the Eldo’s 11thgeneration, but they consider the first-gen to be the 1953 limited-production convertible, and the 2ndthrough 7thgeneration cars to be the higher-end coupes and convertibles which sat above the DeVilles in the Cadillac hierarchy. The first front-drive