1997 Ford Thunderbird LX - A Peciliar Dinosaur

I came across this 1997 Ford Thunderbird LX V-8 during one of my recent "cheap car searches" and it really underscores how much the "automobile" has changed over the last twenty years or so; in particular the last decade. Yes, the car as we know it is becoming all but extinct but one of its offshoots that became, for all intents and purposes, extinct more than a decade ago, will in the near future seem as odd as a peculiar dinosaur you see in a museum. How did that thing survive in the wild in prehistoric times anyway?
 

The Ford Thunderbird and its myriad imitators, Ford invented the personal luxury car segment with their seminal four-passenger, two-door Thunderbird in 1958, survived as long as they did because they appealed to buyers who wanted to make a fashion statement with what they drove. Although far less practical than the sedans they shared platforms and running gear with, they were, for the most part, aesthetically more pleasing as well. For the record, these "tenth generation" Ford Thunderbirds and its Mercury Cougar stable mate, were rather unique in that they utilized a proprietary chassis that wasn't used by any sedan. The 1993-1998 Lincoln Continental Mark VIII used a variation of the  chassis as well.

Personal luxury cars were purchased by people who either wanted to be construed as having good taste, didn't have a family, were single and ready to mingle or a combination of all of the above. Rarely was a one purchased because it performed well. Buyers of these cars are "look at me" people and they're fickle as they come. They could just as soon look at this Thunderbird and see it as as their grand parent's car as quickly as they'd say a 1980 hunchback Cadillac Seville was. 

These days with young, young at heart and old tastemakers opting for swiss army knife capable crossover sport utility vehicles instead of even sedans, something that's little more than a fashion statement seems as quaint as using a typewriter or only having a flip phone. For someone who grew up with two door cars making splashy styling statements, it takes a fair amount of mental gymnastics for me to understand how something that's first and foremost practical can also be alluring. To me, stylish utility vehicles would be like gym wear that's also appropriate at a wedding.

However, the demise of the personal luxury car began long before the onslaught of crossovers. Well, to be fair, you can still get one today but aside from Buick's absurd "Cascada",  and Cadillac's oddly proportioned ATS coupe, you have to go import to get one. And you'll pay dearly for it too. Anyway, as many personal luxury cars as The Big Three may have sold, the meteor that killed them off struck in 1978 when General Motors downsized their intermediate line and that included their personal luxury car lineup. Replacing iconic or moronic designs (depends on your point of view) like the 1973 Chevrolet Monte with a cartoonish knockoff was but one of many mistakes GM has made over the last fifty years. Ford and Chrysler followed suit with debatably as bad or worse downsizing jobs on their personal luxury cars. Just like that, what was once a fashion statement became as outdated as leisure suits. And when gas prices dropped, coupe buyers jumped to trucks.

Ironic then that just as Ford really got it right, the market for personal luxury cars was well on its way to drying up. The MN12 chassis these 1989-1997 Thunderbirds were built on, derided as it was for being heavy, was a robust structure that gave the Thunderbird a rigidity that prior Thunderbird's never had. And with the right engine and suspension tuning, made for a spirited automobile finally  worthy of being called, "Thunderbird".

Too bad Ford missed the mark with the design. What was allegedly inspired by the BMW E24 (6 series) came off as a cheap and bland imitation. Extra cladding  on the wonderful "Super Coupe", which Ford dropped after 1995, made it more NASCAR hunky but these 1994-1997 LX'  lack visceral appeal above and beyond being just a two door car. Again, us coupe buyers are fickle bunch but if a coupe doesn't look marvelous, we'd just as soon drive a four door sedan or, heaven forbid, a cross over. 

4th Generation Pontiac Trans Am - Screaming Chicken

Purpose built, high performance cars that force their drivers and occupants to make supreme sacrifices in comfort are all but non existent these days. Today's "pony cars" are so refined and easy to live with they might as well be cross over sport utility vehicles. So, imagine my delight when I came across this "fourth generation" Pontiac Trans Am last weekend. I don't know what model year it is but I do know it's a '93-'97 based on its front end.



 

I was also happy to see that instead of being some painfully original "trailer queen", our subject here, at least at one time during it's very long life, was in the hands of someone who really appreciated what they had here. These cars and their corporate twins, the Chevrolet Camaro, never came with a Hurst Shifter option. The Hurst replacing the annoying GM "skip shift" manual that forced drivers to shift from first to fourth rather than go into second under light throttle; all in the interest of fuel economy. While it was fairly straight forward to disable, someone here went instead to the extreme of swapping in the Hurst. You see its handle in all its chrome glory to the right of the steering wheel.

 

 

I'll stop short of heaping further praise upon the Hurst Shifter swap since someone, not necessarily the person who did the swap, also saw to it to festoon their car with these badges. Who cares?

 

Oh. And what is that on the hood? Is that what I think it is? Yes it is. A "screaming chicken" hood decal. "Snowman, what's your 20?"

 

 

Granted, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and no doubt this hood bird was applied with the best of intentions but still, instead of looking cool, it looks home made and any shred of "cool" goes flying out the T-tops. A quick search on ebay uncovered several choices of "laughing phoenix" decals that are replica's of the iconic '70's 'birds that decorated second generation T/A's. They certainly look like they'd fit neatly on the narrower hood of our  fourth gen T/A here. Makes you wonder.

 





 

Pontiac first offered the hood decal, it's a stylized phoenix not a chicken, on 1973 Trans Am's. The idea behind it was to make the inverted shaker in the middle of the hood appear as though it belongs there. I don't get that - I think the shaker would look fine without it. Although, I have to admit that somehow, someway, the hood decal works gloriously well on these cars.

 

 

It got larger in subsequent model years. The largest of them being festooned on the "Smokey and the Bandit" cars featured in the 1977 movie blockbuster. By the way, Pontiac did not offer the hood decal on third or fourth generation Trans Am's.

 



 

I hung around for several minutes hoping the owner would appear. No such luck. Love to get the story behind the car, the Hurst Shifter and most importantly, this hood decal. No doubt it's going to be a good one.

 

 

 

2002 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS - The Dale Lives On

This is the latest in an ongoing series on my trials and tribulations keeping my old car on the road.

For the second time in about the last thirty days, this past Tuesday, my 2002 Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS wouldn't turn over as I was leaving the office. Now, it would be one thing if it wouldn't start at home but being that I work twenty-seven miles from where I work, it would be one big pain in the ass if I couldn't get it started. Luckily and just like the last time it did this, it eventually did turnover but not without a catch - it wouldn't stay running. Every time the tachometer dropped below 1000 rpm, the engine stalled out.

To keep it running I kept my foot on the gas to keep the revs up. Coming up to stop lights or having to deal with the little traffic there is here in Cleveland, I had to throw the car in neutral while braking with my left foot while keeping the revs boiling with my right. Of course, a time or two, it stalled out but it turned right back over. To make matters even more interesting, the cruise control wouldn't work so couldn't force the engine to stay at a certain rpm. There was no check engine light on either. However, and just like the last time, eventually the cruise did kick in and everything was fine. I got the car home and turned it over ten times in a row without a hitch.

Knowing that these intermittent problems always become more "mittent", I dropped the car off at Conrad's Friday afternoon for a diagnosis and an oil change. I gave the master mechanic a detailed rundown as to what was going on and he feverishly typed what I said into his 1991 vintage PC.  After he finished typing he looked at me with a serious glare in his eye that I have to imagine a doctor has when they have to tell a patient grim news and he said he had no idea what could be causing the car to not start and stall. Especially since there's no check engine light on and the problem is intermittent. After I left the shop, I waited for the phone to ring with a diagnosis. I braced for impact.

Much to my delight, when I got the call from Conrad's it turned out to be nothing more than a failing mass air flow sensor or "MAF". The "MAF" does what its name implies; it measures the flow of air into a fuel injected engine. They also have a wide variety of symptoms when they start to go. The last time the MAF went on my car, which was maybe 2 1/2 years ago at the most, I felt at times that I was getting gently rear-ended at times and the transmission wasn't making the cleanest nor smoothest of shifts. I feared it was something dire like the transmission failing.  On the 1996 Chevrolet Camaro's my boys drive, failing MAF's made them near impossible to drive. The engines ran rough and could barely shift between gears.

What gets me is how much shops charge to replace simple sensors like MAF's. The all-in cost of having Conrad's diagnose the problem, change my oil and swap out the MAF was $491. That breaks down to $100 for the diagnostic, $25 for an oil change, $338 for a new MAF, ($225 for the part and $113 for labor) and ancillary bullshit shop fees and taxes. I thanked Conrad's for the diagnosis and oil change and got out the door for $153. They also recommended some other services like cleaning the fuel injectors and changing out spark plugs and wires jacking up the potential cost of the day to $745. I appreciate the fact that these shops have huge overhead but...wow; I have to wonder how many people take them up on these recommendations? Thanks, but no thanks.

I bought a new, actually remanufactured, MAF from NAPA for $153 saving $183. Two small screws and a plug later and my car is running as good as new; it took me less than five minutes to do the swap. While I'm certainly not happy about having dropped $308, especially the kick in the groin that is Conrad's diagnostic fee, I do have the peace of mind that the MAF was the problem. Also, not knowing what the problem was beforehand, my wife and I were prepared for the worst; replacing the whole car if it came back that there was something prohibitively expensive to repair. $308 is a relative drop in the bucket and money, in my opinion, very well spent. Especially when I consider that on the cheap end, I may have jumped into a replacement car that may have cost me $300 a month for the next 36 to 48 months. All good.

Pushing 165,000 miles, "The Dale" lives on.

1986 Nissan 300 ZX - You Can't Be All Things To All People

 

Let's make an assumption that in 1984, buyers of Nissan's new 300 ZX would have cross-shopped Chevrolet's also new for 1984 Corvette. I think that makes sense given they were priced around the same and offered similar rakish, good looks with more than an ample dab of sporting pretense. The similarities ended there, though since while the Corvette was finally a sports car to be taken seriously, well, more seriously given where the make had been prior and the 300 ZX, with a sports car lineage to die for, had become more luxury car grand touring car than an out and out sports car. Our subject is a 1986.
 

Even going back to when the first generation "ZX" came out in 1978, they were derided for not being the Datsun 240 Z - which was a raw, edgy, "pure" sports car. And an affordable one at that. Thing is, though, real sports cars make miserable daily drivers. The mass majority of people, even those who think they want a real sports car, don't want something that's impossible to get in and out, are noisy and are going to pound their kidneys into sawdust everyday. A weekend jaunt? Sure. But day in and day out the routine gets old. Fast. "Sports cars" tend to be quite expensive too. So, the combination of impracticality, harshness and being expensive makes for a very niche targeted automobile segment.

 

I'm doing my darnedest trying to remember what twenty something year old me thought of these cars back then. When you drove the crap I did in the 1980's these cars where as unobtainable as getting a date with Madonna. It being the 1980's and Japanese cars kicking the tail pipe out of anything and everything domestically, I probably thought that since it was a Japanese car it was vastly superior to the Corvette; which in the long run as just a car it was. As a "sports car", though, and this goes for its visceral appeal as much as anything, it came up short. Way short. The Corvette may have been a crude appliance but at least in terms of what you should buy a sports car for, this car couldn't touch it. 

 

Is it better to look the part but not really be who you pretend to be or actually be the part and be off putting? Well, having bought a car or two in my day that was wholly impractical and impossible to live with as a daily driver, all I can tell you is you'll be happier in the end with something that looks sporty as opposed to being really capable.

 

Then again, you know what they say about trying to be all things to all people. After almost 15 model years of producing soggy and pretentious sporty looking cars, undoubtedly meticulously well screwed together sporty looking cars, Nissan replaced this car in 1989 with a real sports car that was as off putting to the gold chain and golf club sect as it was appealing to those who longed for the original Datsun 240 Z. It also gave Corvette an old fashioned run for its money.  

1972 Cadillac Sedan deVille - Daddy's Caddy

Try as I might and as vast and glorious as the internet is, I have yet to find a facsimile of the automotive scourge of my woe-begotten wonder years, a blue on black, black vinyl topped, 1972 Cadillac Sedan deVille. There are plenty of 1972 Sedan deVille's out there, but nothing that resembles exactly what my parents bought that long ago summer of 1978.
 

 

That probably has as much to do with the wide variety of color scheme options available on domestic cars in general and Cadillac's in particular back then. That and the fact that a 1972 anything is now forty-six going on forty-seven years old and no doubt the vast majority of them have met the business end of a hydraulic press. This shot from a brochure for 1972 Cadillac's is the exact color scheme of my parent's '72 but it's a Fleetwood 75 and not a Sedan deVille. Close but no cigar.
 

This is the closest I've ever come to finding one but it lacks the vinyl top and black dungeon leather interior; it'll have to do for this traipse down my memory lane of adolescent misery. To summarize, out of the literal blue, in the summer of 1977, my mother wanted my father to ditch the Ford Ranch Wagon we had for, of all things, a Cadillac. Used, of course. Not that there's anything wrong with buying a used car but the buying process was so arduous, that it took my painfully indecisive parents two full summers to find one that fit their needs. Or fancy or who knows. It got so bad that even car loving me would often times beg off going car shopping with them knowing full well nothing was ever going to get done.

Once they found something, though, the pride of ownership my father had for it was a sight to behold. I wasn't a fan of that car, more on that in a second or two, but I was happy that my father was happy. Which, sadly, wasn't very often. What's more, it was unnerving how dangerously he drove that hulk.  He didn't drive it through the oh-so-narrow streets of Baldwin, Long Island as much as barreled through them fully expecting drivers of what he deemed lesser cars to give him the right of way. And, imagine this, more often than not, they didn't. Nothing short of a miracle he never had a head-on collision driving that impossibly wide, long, under-powered, gas guzzling, shuddering mess of an automobile. 

I was not a fan of that car for two reasons. First, I found the overall "mood" of the car depressing.  A black leather interior similar to this doing nothing to offset or compliment the dreary exterior shade of midnight blueness. The seats were hard like church pews and were slippery, joyless, austere...foreboding. This was a luxury car? Might as well have been a hearse. In many ways, though, the car was a microcosm of my parents; make some attempt to put up a good front even though you know you're nothing that you're pretending to be. And when you get tired of trying, just give up. No one cares anyway. Well, at least they got that right. 

What I disliked most about that car was how pretentious I felt riding in it. Who the hell did my parents think they were kidding? My mother, who didn't drive but was the literal driver of anything and everything my father did, didn't want a Cadillac because she liked them, she wanted a status symbol. Please. We were far from well-off and buying an overwrought, worn out relic didn't make us look wealthy; I felt it made us look trashy. Well, trashier.

 

 

Furthermore, going from a stripper station wagon to a Cadillac must have looked like my father got the mother of promotions or someone in the family kicked the bucket and they blew the inheritance on a car. Again, as if anyone cared. Perhaps if it had a flashier color combination and was a Coupe deVille I would have at least liked the car for what it was and saw past the image it portended. Seeing that it was a four-door with that dour color combination, I couldn't help but feel like a phony. I wasn't proud that my parents drove a Cadillac; I felt embarrassed.

 

 



Image problems aside, the car itself was a total bitch. Wildly over-boosted, "variable assist power steering" doing nothing to help the soggy springs, shocks and mushy brakes make whomever got stuck behind the wheel a better driver. The car had a disconnected floatiness to it that made it the very essence of "land yacht". Oh, and how it shook. I always felt it had been in an accident and was thrown back together on the cheap. However, apparently that was endemic of that generation of hard-top Cadillac's. In the summer of '81, I took "Driver's Ed" in my high school's 1976 Plymouth Volare which I found to be vastly superior in every which way to Daddy's oafish Caddy. Imagine that, me finding a Plymouth Volare to be a far more compelling transportation conveyance than "The Standard of the World". 

That car was also incredibly unreliable too. It seemed like everything broke on the damn thing in the four short years my parents owned it. Of all the problems my father had with it, from the transmission blowing up to the AC constantly failing to who the hell remembers what else, the biggest problem was gas mileage. Or lack thereof. Cars in general back then, even six-cylinder economy cars like my piece of junk '74 Mercury Comet, were not good on gas but "Dad's Cad" took poor gas mileage to another sub-basement of awful. Not quite sure what "NOT 4 MPG" means here but it's an obvious reference to how bad on gas this car is. 4 miles per gallon, by the way, slightly better than the, I kid you not, 3 miles per gallon our car got. 

The combination of an emissions choked, supposedly 215-horsepower, 472 cubic-inch V-8, a Rochester QuadraJet in need of a rebuild, 4700 pounds of curb weight, the aerodynamics of a barn, non electronic ignition and a stump pulling 2.94:1 final drive ratio (everything is relative) and we blew through 27 "usable gallons" of gas in well under 100 miles. Incredible. Highway mileage, of course, was better but not by much. With gas prices climbing over a dollar a gallon in the early '80's, that car was very expensive to operate. And when it became readily apparent that my father had trouble footing the gas bill, in the winter of '82, off it went for a supposedly gas sipping, V-6 powered, 1980 Buick Century. The hits just kept on coming.

 

Through it all, though, the first couple of years we had that car were some of the more pleasant times in my life growing up if for no other reason than my parents seemed happy, somewhat stable. Both suffered from depression and they self-medicated; my father with the bottle, my mother with diet and sleeping pills. They handled their misery differently too; my father was reclusive and was happy being alone while my mother craved constant attention and was combative, mean spirited and verbally abusive. Something changed, though in 1980 - did my father change jobs or was my mother cut her off from her pills? My usually razor sharp memory about that time in my life is a little foggy but all I know is things went downhill rapidly for them around that time. My mother's state of mind , which was always questionable, spiraled downward; she rarely got out of bed for the last 13 years of her life (just as well) and my father became ever more distant, solemn and unreachable. I'd find vodka and whisky pints everywhere. Including inside that ugly Cadillac. 



It's ironic, then, that if I had my druthers and my wife was on board with it, I'd jump at the chance to own a 1972 Cadillac; Coupe deVille of course. And not blue on black. Something a bit more bold like the '71 I lusted after several years ago when we first moved to north east Ohio. And hell no, I don't want one for sentimental reasons - I want one because I really like the looks of them and I think they're cool. Imagine that. Even if having one in my garage would be a constant reminder of those strange days when my parents bought what was nothing more than costume jewelry to make themselves appear, if only to themselves, that they were more than they were.

1979 Fiat 124 Sports Spider - Patience of Job

 

Any fondness I have for these types of car is because they remind of my late father in law; a Korean War veteran who had just enough Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in him, Al Pacino's character in "Scent of a Woman", to make him as charming as he was, at times, difficult to deal with. He and I had a solid relationship based on mutual respect and love for his middle daughter. Try as I may, though, to convince him otherwise, he was fixated on these types of cars that he insisted were "sports cars". And even though he never had a Fiat 124 like this 1979, I know this little guy would be right in his wheelhouse. 

 

 

Nowadays, with even the lowliest of cross overs offering handling, braking and acceleration prowess that would put most sports cars of yore to shame, it can be challenging to understand what anyone would find appealing about these cars. Aside from their undeniable good looks. Underpowered, buzzy, noisy, unreliable and crude, what if anything was there to love?

 

 

Well, like many an old car, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To men and women of a certain age, these cars were an integral part of their youth. For instance, the story goes that when World War II veterans returned home from Europe, they came back with a taste for the nimble little cars they drove "over there" and began shipping Alfa's, MG's, Triumph's and the like back home. General Motors seized upon that wave, supposedly, and came out with the Corvette in 1953. But they weren't fooling anyone. That Corvette was a shortened wheelbase, six cylinder Chevrolet sedan with a plastic body to die for bolted down on top of it. A nimble handling Italian, British or French sports car it was not. Then again, most European "sports cars" back then were little more than rebodied sedans as well. Thing was, the sedans they started with were infinetly better performing cars to start with.

 

 

So, what the heck is this thing anyway? Well, you wouldn't be alone mistaking it for an Alfa Romeo Spyder or an MG. Or even a Triumph Spitfire. Our 124 Sports Spider here was part of a series of automobiles Fiat produced from 1966 through 1982. There were two and four door sedans, a fixed roof coupe and the "Sports Spider". While the sedans were replaced by the 131 in 1974, the Sports Spiders stayed on through 1982. The biggest difference between one of these and other 124's is that the Spider had a shorter wheelbase. Otherwise, underneath, they were pretty much all the same based on their model year.

 

 

If these cars are known for anything aside from their handsome, House of Pinninfarina penned lines, it's that they were notoriously unreliable. Bad transmissions, poor electrical systems, ignition issues and a utter lack of rust proofing. All of those challenges, and no doubt many others, drive the prices for these cars way, way down. Which is not a bad thing if you have the patience of Job.

 

 

Personally, I do not. Although, I have to admit, the idea of an LS swap is very alluring. All but impossible to do without major fabrication and probable altering of the way the car looks but alluring nonetheless.

 



 

Then again, doing that and it wouldn't be what it is. Or was. That being another generation's, like my late father in law's, time machine.

 

The term "spider" or "spyder", as it pertains to automobiles, stems from the days of horse drawn carriages. Lighter carriages that were intended to do little more than carry people had large wheels and a small seating area that made the overall look of the carriage resemble a spider. When carriages were replaced by automobiles, manufacturers of small, lightweight automobiles began marketing them as  "spiders"; even if they didn't resemble spiders at all.

 



1980 Pontiac Bonneville - Stuff of Dreams

The Bonneville Salt Flats are a 30,000 acre stretch of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake in north western Utah. Covering approximately 46 square miles, they're named after U.S. Army officer Benjamin Bonneville who explored the area in the 1830's. Each summer on the flats, amateur and professional race teams compete for land speed records in a wide variety of different vehicles. Why the now defunct Pontiac Motor Division of General Motors felt compelled to rivet or glue "Bonneville" to a series of vehicles that were neither extraordinarily fast or in need of additional seasoning is a question we'll never get a complete answer to. Nonetheless, between 1958 and 2005 Pontiac did. Our fairly handsome albeit far from fast or sporty subject here is a 1980 Bonneville coupe.

What's in a name? Nothing, really; especially when dealing with automobiles. After all how many vehicles actually live up to what their named after? Pontiac's various Bonneville's were hardly the stuff of land speed records but over the years the nameplate became as synonymous if not more so with a Pontiac than it did being associated with a curious stretch of flatness so big you can actually see the curvature of the earth at a distance.

The Bonneville's position on Pontiac's totem pole was as ponderous as a starting NFL quarterback's job security. From stater to being benched, back and forth, downgraded an ultimately forgotten about, going on a decade since GM's massive reorganization that led to the entire Pontiac division's ouster, our 1980 Bonneville here here is just another vestige of the old General Motors. That being an unwieldy corporate giant that was comprised of five automobile divisions that all mass produced essentially the same cars with nuanced styling differences.

That didn't make any sense then and certainly makes even less sense now. Yet through it all I find this car to be as utterly alluring as a western driving trip would be to the place that it's named after. I mean, seriously, how fitting would it be to go the Bonneville Salt Flats in an actual Bonneville? If I came home one day with this car telling my family we were driving to Utah they'd, once again, believe I've lost my mind since all they'd see with this car is literally what it is; a nondescript "old man's car". They don't see it as another time machine back to my youth. 

No, my old man never had a Pontiac Bonneville but I knew plenty of families that did or had similar types of cars from GM. I'm not alone in my appreciation for these cars either; they have many a fan of mostly men of a particular age. I know I'd get sick and tired of this big old salty boat quickly but if it were only a little bit closer I'd love to stab the gas and take it for a spin and be 16 again. Understand that compared to the dreadful cars I had back then, these big stylish GM's were the stuff of dreams.

  

Our subject here was part of GM's 1980 updating of their much acclaimed 1977 downsized, full sized models. As ballyhooed as the '77's were, the 1980 models were derided for much of the same reasons what they '77's replaced were. Too big, too thirsty. We have to remember that things were much different  in 1980 compared to 1977 what with the second gas crisis jacking prices of gas up and over the one dollar a gallon mark. Sales of big cars dried up like a lake in the middle of the dessert. 

Perhaps, maybe, in the end, Pontiac's use of "Bonneville" was appropriate.