Representing Father's Day with the Car With Two Trunks!

THE MOST PRACTICAL CAR OF THE LATE '60S?

My little sister from another mister Neen spotted this little Kraut roosting in the Empire Region and sent me some snaps. I'm glad she did because I love these rides so much!

This is a 1965-1969 Volkswagen Type III Fastback in Savannah Beige. This is the "car with 2 trunks" and it is in lovely condition!
*One amazing detail is the windshield washer fluid dispenser which is that little dot between the cowl vents. It is powered by an air hose connecting the spare tire to the fluid reservoir. That means that if you use the windshield washer with abandon and forget to inflate the spare you'll have a flat tire in the trunk!

The Type III was named as such because the Beetle was 1st and the bus 2nd in production dates. These came in Fastback and Squareback (known in Europe as the Variant) body styles in the States. Europe also had a 2 door coupe version with a proper little trunk lid called the Notchback. The Fastback was introduced to replace the Notchback but both turned out to be so popular that they sold them alongside each other (in the rest of the world anyway).

Those vents along the quarter panel bring fresh air into the engine compartment which was truly essential as this is an air cooled car. Unlike the Beetle this is a flatter "pancake" engine that fits underneath the rear floor. If you lift up the hood here you'll see a flat floor leading up the rear seat (that folds forward for extra storage). To access the engine you would move the rubber mat to expose a removable panel beneath. The front hood is the main trunk with the spare tire and gas tank too.

We know this is a '60s version because of these delicate chrome ringed lights and smaller signals. Starting in 1970 much larger lights incorporating both brakes and turn signals arrived.
In 1968 the Type III became the first car to have fuel injection as standard equipment. They ran very smooth, always started easily, and offered great gas milage. This may or may not have that setup but regardless I would love to roll around town in this little beauty.

If this is your car I'm sorry but you must be anhedonic.

X-BODY STANDS FOR EXTRA BORING

Back to basics people. I started this blog to celebrate and/or openly mock cars that looked like they shouldn't be on the road anymore. This fussy little brick fits the bill to a T!

What we have here is a painfully dull and utterly forgotten footnote in automotive history. On paper it is a 1984 Buick Skylark Custom in Light Sand Grey. Even the color name makes my eyelids heavy.

*yawn*

This is what George Orwell meant when he wrote 1984.

The dystopian paint job is giving up everywhere at once. Paint jobs and clear coats were prone to failure from the early '80s through the mid-'90s for whatever reason. Find me a single Beretta or Lumina with a nice factory paint job and I'll buy you lunch.

Buick was always #2 in the General Motors hierarchy below Cadillac but above Olds, Pontiac, and Chevy at the bottom. In 1984 this meant that the X-Body Chevy Citation would inevitably be fitted with more stately styling cues and a Buick emblem. This is classic badge engineering.

That one smoky dead eye is unnerving.

A more formal grill that its siblings, and a more squared-off, upright design set the Buick apart from the Citation, but under the skin it was identical. Does anybody remember the Cadillac Cimarron? It almost killed Cadillac off by employing the most egregious badge engineering in history. One look at the Cimarron and you knew it was a Chevy Citation with leather and gold emblems.

*Spell check wanted to change Cimarron to Macaroni. Most Cimarron owners would gladly trade their car in for a whole bunch of delicious macaroni.

This lump is powered by the Iron Duke inline 4 cylinder engine, built by Pontiac. This venerable, if not actually loved, engine could rocket all 2,600lbs of Skylark up to 96mph! Ready to merge onto the highway? Plan ahead as 0-60mph took a very leisurely 15 seconds. Count to 15 seconds so you can feel how long that actually is.

The interior consisted of a collapsed sun shade and some throw pillows. The door panels actually look like brown tweed. Buying this car new was a declaration of boredom.

There is a car I like even less than this one and it happens to be its successor (though only for the 2 door models). In 1986 the Somerset Regal hit the market which looked like you cut the width of the rear doors out and attached the back window to the back of the front door. It was all hood no trunk and looked ridiculous.

That gas door screams lack of interest to detail. Huge, square, and taking up most of the quarter panel, it is the definition of just going through a checklist of what needs to be on a car in order to function. I can't think of a design where it is more of an afterthought.

This is the tail end of the Malaise era. Even though the X-Body cars were introduced in 1980 the bumpers have the look of designers caught by surprise when the federal safety regulations hit in 1974. These days we take it for granted that bumpers are integrated with the body, but this sports chrome guardrails that look 2 sizes too big.

This is the lowest trim level available for 1984; the Custom. No vinyl roof and no side trim at all.

The emblem whispering to anyone that will listen that this is the base model is tiny! This car seems to be staring at the ground a lot in embarrassment. I mean look at that acne!

Are there any high points? The X-Bodies were all front wheel drive which was a leap in the right direction for small car handling. Also, the distance between the wheels is pretty substantial so I'm guessing it's pretty sure-footed. You'd be going so slow though that it wouldn't really matter.

There was a sporty version of this ride called the T-Type. Not to be confused with the turbocharged T-Type Regal, it nevertheless came with a high output V6 engine. The T-Type was only available in 2 door coupe form. With the H.O. V6 and a manual trans you could hit 116mph and (more importantly) go from 0-60 in 8.6 seconds; almost half of this stock slab.

Well we'll leave this thing looking at us from its best angle. This is the classmate whose yearbook never got signed. It arrived, continued along for awhile, and dropped out of existence without leaving its mark at all. Nobody collects these and nobody is looking for one. The fact that it exists in 2016 Brooklyn was enough for me to take a moment but genuinely expect for these X-Body Skylarks to be extinct any second now.

Long winded breakdown of full size GM offerings from '66 through '75

FIVE OF A KIND

The dog days of summer have me relaxing as opposed to posting so I figured I'd drop a whole handful of rides that are close siblings. Without further ado;

What we have here is a 1967 Chevrolet Caprice in what might be Madeira Maroon Poly. While this is a sweet classic now it was one of the most popular cars of its day when built. Over 124,000 left the assembly line in this year alone!

Here she is parked on busy Bedford in Williamsburg. The forward-leaning style of the front end was a one year only design. The year previous didn't have those running lights on the outer edge of the grill (the turn signals are actually located down in the bumper), and the top of the grill was lower than the tops of the headlights in the following year.

The venerable 327 V8 powers this beast but it could have just as easily been a 283, 350, 396, or 427 (a mere 50 of the 427 equipped Caprices were built though so if you see one rotting away somewhere let me know!). Transmission options were also many, with 3 and 4 speed manuals and 2 different automatics all available.

This was the first year for the Caprice as a stand alone model and it represented the top of the heap for the full-size lineup.

I love the old dealership emblems they used to produce for cars. A decal is usually present now (or the phoning-it-in license plate frame) but the ones where they gave some effort to ape the chrome script of the factory emblems really stand out now. As is often the case this one has a couple of screws going directly through it to hold it in place.

Fit and finish is slightly wonky and scrapes and scuffs abound, but this is a solid and really good looking driver. If it were a show car you probably wouldn't want to park it on a busy street.

Look at all that trunk hanging out past the rear axle! In the '70s the trunk would shrink and the hood would grow to enormous lengths. This car is pretty huge by todays standards but it is somewhat balanced in its proportions. 

Well we'll leave this eager punk where it sits looking ready to pounce. Now on to a more sedate, later example:

Ahhh yes, here is the serene 1973 Chevy Impala in yawn-inducing BEIGE. This color looks so gentle that it looks like it came from a hospital. If your psychologist is suddenly unavailable they could let you sit on the big bench seat inside this ride and you would feel calm.
*By the way, the only way I know of discerning an Impala from a Caprice in '73 is the grill. The Impala has twice as many horizontal and vertical lines in it as the Caprice.

This is pretty darn close to immaculate which is shocking for two reasons; first of all it's a 42 year old car in New York with no rust! Second of all this was the car of choice for lowriders everywhere. So many of these got used up with 100 spoke Dayton wheels, upholstered steering wheels, and hydraulics that encountering a stock version is almost impossible.

There's some faint rust at the lower edge of the concave rear window but that seems to be the extent of the damage. The trunk lid has what seems to be a mock hood scoop which is something I haven't seen on any other car.

The federally mandated bumpers were introduced in stages. This year is on the cusp where the huge front bumpers ready to withstand a 5mph crash are already in place. This is the last gasp for rear bumpers that incorporate the taillights before the regulations for the rear came due in '74.

The stock hubcaps are nice enough, and the lower body crease helps temper the dimensions of this beast. The 350 V8 was standard in '73 but you could also order a 400 and 454. Now lets lose the roof:

Here we have an EVIL 1972 Impala convertible in Tuxedo Black. This is the last year for an Impala drop-top as it would move to the upscale Caprice the following year.
The grill has been spray painted black (for extra toughness I suppose). Those cheeseball plastic mirrors are not original and I'm calling the owner out on it! The originals were square brushed stainless steel examples that fit a large car.

You can see the lineup I was presented with on this block! We'll see those other rides in a minute.
The hubcaps on this beast are Chevy, but they come from an early-'80s Suburban.

A white roof on a convertible is a stroke of genius since it helps keep the interior cool in the sun. I had a convertible with a black top and interior once and even though it looked great the seats were 1,000 degrees no matter what.
Next we'll flip-flop color schemes:

This is a 1974 Caprice convertible in Antique White. It's very easy to date this car because it's the last year for the headlights being tucked in behind the leading edge of the fenders and the first year for the huge rear bumpers. This basic design would continue through '76 but the final two years had the a flat grill out front with the headlight pods on an angle leaning back. The overall impression of that look is a fainthearted attempt at making a square slab aerodynamic. 

Here's that ridiculously huge rear bumper hanging off like a park bench. It also gives the impression of squinting or lazy rear taillights to me. Why you would need those additional little bumper guards on there is a mystery to me.
This was the first year for a Caprice convertible. The name on the hardtop was located on the sail panel behind the rear side window. For the convertible you can see the emblem located on the leading top edge of the quarter panel.
Now on to an interloper:

Here we have a 1975 Buick Electra 225 Limited in Arctic White with a Maroon vinyl landau roof. We can pinpoint the date because this is Buicks first year for square headlights and the following years would see the turn signals directly under the headlights instead of down in the bumper.

Buick was above Chevy, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile in the GM hierarchy but still below Cadillac in luxury. Some of those extra touches exist here though like the stand up hood ornament and the cornering lamps on the sides. Under the skin however this car is the same as the Impalas and Caprices from the same year (along with the Olds 98, Caddillac Coupe de Ville, and Pontiac Grandville for that matter).

The plastic bumper extensions missing here are easily the weakest link for all GM cars of the era. Most Buicks and Cadillacs need them replaced at some point. This car is a true hooptie with the trunk lock missing and dents, scrapes, and rust all over it.
Well there you have it for GM full size beasts from '66 and '72-'75. I've ridden in at least one example of each of these yachts and they all ride nicely with plenty of power and cushy comfort. Parts for them are readily available too since all were made in vast quantities. These days one can still be had at a reasonable rate and would be a breeze to maintain.