1958 Rambler American - The Rambler-iest Rambler?

Mirror, mirror on the garage wall, which American Motors' car was the Rambler-iest Rambler of them all? Good question. "Rambler-iest Rambler" meant to denote the most unsophisticated, uncool, unhip, dorkiest, dweebiest, booger eating car AMC affixed "Rambler" to between 1955 and 1969. To me it's a toss-up between 1958 to 1960 and 1961 to 1963 "Rambler Americans". Push comes to shove; my money's on the '58-'60's. This well restored blue bomber is a 1958. 

"Rambler" was the primary brand of the American Motors Corporation, or "AMC", which was what the company was named after the merger of the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation and Hudson Motors in 1954. Apparently, the new company determined there was sufficient brand equity and cache in "Rambler" since Nash had relative success with their compact, luxurious, fairly expensive and distinctively styled "Nash Rambler" (above) going back to 1950. 

Despite Nash's success with the compact Rambler, the new American Motors discontinued its production after 1955 and moved all production to a longer wheelbase car they branded as "Rambler". With it's "what-the-hell-is-that" styling, sales of these cars were roughly half of what they were projected to be. These 1956 and 1957 Rambler's ran a close third to the Rambler Americans for Ramblier-est Rambler. 

AMC updated styling on the "big" Ramblers for 1958 making them more somewhat more conventional looking. With the country headed for a recession, they also saw an opportunity in the low-priced, compact car space and repurposed Nash's old Rambler as the "American". 

With its lightweight, aerodynamic, unibody construction and feature rich interior, the 1950 Nash Rambler was considered quite advanced when new and still held its own in 1958 as a "Rambler American". Although, American Motors decided against the upscale interior detailing that made the Nash Rambler stand out from other small cars. They did, however, kibosh the controversial rear fender skirts; the fronts, which gave the Nash Rambler its unique inverted bathtub aesthetic, had been removed in 1955.

Not a fan of the fender skirted Nash Rambler were you? Careful what you wish for. That the rear axle doesn't align with the tear-drop fender opening doesn't do the toy-car like proportions of these cars any favors. 1958 to 1960 Rambler Americans were available only as two-door sedans. 

From this rear-three-quarter view, it doesn't look as proportionally out of balance as it does from other angles. The fishbowl effect of the lens on what I assume is an iPhone camera adds a robustness that these cars don't actually have too; iPhone's typically make things look better than they actually are. They can't do anything to make this car appear less like a design out of the 1940's rather than the '50's, though. Having the domestic compact car lane all to themselves, these sold fairly well. 

The stubby little American did relatively well, though. Attribute that to the growing popularity of small, imported cars in this country and a cheap car sold in a down economy.  

Once the Big Three came out with their compact cars in 1960, AMC's small car goose was cooked. AMC updated the American for 1961 changing little more than wrapper on the 1950 vintage Nash Rambler chassis. American did eventually come with a clean-sheet "American" in 1964. The four-door versions, new-for-'61, were built on a 108-inch-long wheelbase. 

There you have it, friend-oh, my pick for the Rambler-est Rambler of them all with '56 and '57's a close second.  Honorable mention to my old man's 1961 Rambler "Classic". 

 

1968 Chevrolet Impala Custom Coupe - The Look

I need another blog about a Chevrolet Impala Custom Coupe like I need another hole in my trunk, but I thought I'd do a quickie today on this nice looking '68 that popped up on Marketplace recently not far from the Triple Wide. Asking price is $15,000. 

To review, the Impala Custom Coupe was new for 1968 using the formal rear roofline the Caprice coupe used. While I prefer the formal roof over the exaggerated, almost cartoonish swoopy fast back of the Impala Sport Coupe. how and why Chevrolet sold two-distinct versions of the same car, and got away with it, is nothing short of amazing. Then again, Chevrolet in the 1960's could sell a moldy ham sandwich on four-wheels and sell a quarter million of them. 

For your fifteen-grand, which I think is a ton of money for this car, you'd get what appears to be a fairly clean looking car but look deeper, and we see there's a "396" engine tag on the left front fender, a "307" tag on the right front. 

Poster of the ad claims this car has the 307 so good to go there, but what's up with the 396 tag? 

Rust? Accident? Something's up. Small detail? At $15,000, I don't think so. For the asking price, even with the flaws this car has, if it had the 396, I'd think it might be priced just about right. 

Zoom in and we see the seats are awash in black duct tape too. I don't know, for 15-grand, I'd need little things like the seats to be clean and engine tags to match. My wife probably wouldn't notice the engine tags at first, the taped-up seats she'd notice for sure and give me, "The Look of Death". 

I can live with the Chevy rally rims, these weren't available on non-SS models in 1968, Fender skirts on a '68 Impala coupe? Not a factory available option. 

If you have to have this, it's better bought closer to $10,000. The mis-matched engine tags, patched up seats along with the tiny engine, that comes with the Powerglide two-speed automatic it was born with, is enough to have me continue my search. 

 

1996 Oldsmobile Cutlass SL - Hard Pass

I've had five Chevrolet Lumina\Monte Carlo's, so I know a thing or two or ten about General Motors GM10 and W-bodies like this 1996 Oldsmobile Cutlass SL. This 168,000-mile redhead popped up for sale on Marketplace recently not far from the Triple Wide with an asking price of $2,500.

Seeing I'm perpetually in the market for a two-thousand-dollar beater and being a fan of these cars you'd think I'd be all over it. Well, while priced right, the combination of this engine with 168,000-miles on it, Cutlass' my least favorite of the GM10\W coupes and it being red all conspire to have me making a hard pass on it. 

Let's start with that engine, General Motors' LQ1, 3.4-liter, dual-overhead-cam, 24-valve V-6 they put in all GM10\W-bodies except the Buick Regal's. It was GM's first DOHC, four-valve per cylinder V-6 and was their answer to the Yamaha built, 3.0- and 3.2-liter DOHC V-6 of Ford Taurus SHO fame. Incidentally, while the poster of the Marketplace ad says this car has the "3400", the LQ1 was never known as that. The GM 3400 was a different engine although they're technically related; both started out as GM's 2.8-liter V-6 that first powered Chevrolet Citations back in 1979. GM built it from 1991 through 1997. 

There were a number of reasons for its short production run. The LQ1 was expensive to build and for customers to maintain and, frankly, it wasn't a very good engine. It was sluggish, thirsty, noisy and a bear to work on. Additionally, GM's "3800 Series II", an engine they had all along and eventually replaced it with, was smoother and more responsive, simpler, less expensive to build and maintain, made almost as much horsepower and torque, got great gas mileage and was bulletproof reliable. Parts are plentiful for it these days as well whereas LQ1 parts are hard to find. You'll pay through the throttle body for them too. 

Additionally, while I'm not a fan of any of the four-door variants of the GM10\W-bodies, the Oldsmobile Cutlass coupes are my least favorite of the two-door's. Especially these cladded-up 1992-1997 models. I don't think cladding per se to be an issue, it's just that in certain applications, like on these cars, it appears fussy, tacky and unnecessary. Hey, if I wanted a mid-'90's Pontiac Grand Am, I'd get a mid-'90's Pontiac Grand Am. The red finish does nothing for it either. 

On the inside things get a bit better although the monochromatic theme gets a little dreary after a while; these buckets are fabulous and except for a nick or two here and there, appear to be in great shape. If the air blows cold, whoever bought this did pretty well for themselves and they should keep it until something goes wrong with the engine. You never know, if the engine was well-maintained, the buyer could get three or more years out of it. They might get three months out of it too. 

I still find it amazing how in less than twenty-years, Oldsmobile went from being one of the best-selling automobile brands in the world to oblivion. Many blame the lack of sales of these cars for their undoing, seeing that in the height of Oldsmobile's success forty percent of their sales were Cutlass', there might be something to that. 

Oldsmobile sold these cars through 1997 replacing it in the middle of the model year with the Intrigue. Sales of the Intrigue, which were only available as four-door sedans, while good at first, tapered off quickly, Oldsmobile discontinued production of the Intrigue after the 2001 model year. GM shuttered the Oldsmobile division after 2004. 

1969 AMC AMX- Holy Blind Spot, Batman!

 

In the late 1950's and into the early 1960's, American Motors, or "AMC", had carved out a nice niche for selling cars that were smaller than what The Big Three sold. However, once GM, Ford and Chrysler came out with economy cars of their own, AMC's sales began to founder. To make matters worse, AMC's cars were construed as being stodgy and unhip. They determined that the quickest and most efficient way to change their image was to go directly after the, no pun intended, booming youth market. That pursuit resulted ultimately in the two-passenger, 1968 to 1970 AMX like the 1969 in ""butternut beige" pictured above. 

The AMX wasn't AMC's first salvo at younger buyers. On the left we have the goofy, "3+3", Rambler Marlin, AMC's first attempt at appealing to "kids" in 1965.  Not surprisingly, it flopped. On the right is their second fore ray, what they called "Javelin" in 1968 that was better received. You wouldn't be alone in thinking it a Ford Mustang or a late '60's Mercury Cougar. Or some Australian derivative of an American car design. If I was of the age and means back then to buy a new car, I'd look at a Javelin. Then probably buy a Camaro, Firebird or Mustang. 

The origin story of the AMX is fairly convoluted but it boils down to executive management demanding a two-passenger car that emulated the 1966 AMX concept car. Problem was the suits upstairs hamstrung designers and engineers with budget constraints. 

The result was the 1968 1/2 AMX, which was little more than a Javelin with a 12-inch shorter wheelbase, no back seat and holy blind spot, Batman, the funkiest rear end this side of a Tatra T77. The kind-of-cool but at the same time dorky as any Rambler that came before it little car didn't appeal nearly as well to buyers as the Javelin did. 

In their review of a 1968 AMX, Road &Track magazine applauded AMC embracing the sporty, two-passenger car market they predicted would become prevalent after Ford introduced the four-passenger Mustang back in 1964. Newsflash, they were wrong about the public's buy-in of two-passenger cars. 

They tactfully chastised the AMX for its awkward proportions and its close resemblance to the Javelin. They downplayed any notion that AMC was attempting to compete with the Chevrolet Corvette noting that the Corvette wasn't a mainstream automobile whereas the AMX, given it shared so much with the Javelin, was supposed to be. The only thing the AMX and Corvette intrinsically had in common was they both were two-passenger cars. 

R&T found the steering heavy and slow with plenty of understeer although cars with the gross-rated, 315-horsepower, 390-cu. in. V-8 could easily pull drivers out of it. The optional four-speed manual's ratios were too closely spaced and the rear brakes locked up easily. Fuel economy was abysmal but typical of the era at 11-to-13 miles-per-gallon of premium fuel. They clocked a 390 car like our butternut special here going from zero-to-sixty in 7.2-seconds. Not bad for a car with serious traction issues. 

Mattered little, though. AMC sold less than twenty thousand AMX' in two-and-a-half years of production making them extremely rare. These cars do have their ribald fans, though. AMX' in decent shape like this one can command more than $25,000, ones in showroom condition go for more than $40,000. 

AMC pulled the plug on the AMX after 1970 using the suffix on top-of-the-line, four-passenger, new-for-1971 Javelins they built through 1974. Harmlessly, AMC affixed "AMX", to a number of different models before Chrysler bought them, ostensibly, for their Jeep division in 1987. 

1998 Cadillac Eldorado convertible - Not Worth It at Any Price

 

2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, what was at the time, supposedly, the last factory convertible sold in this country. Someone must have really missed the good old days of Eldorado convertibles because on top of this 1998 Cadillac Eldorado's $42,000 window sticker, the original owner forked over an additional $25,000 to get this literally converted to a convertible. 

Problem with convertibles whether they're factory or not, they don't all look good top up, top down. or both. This conversion here actually doesn't look half-bad top up or down. Also means it doesn't look half good. At the end of the day, how a convertible looks is what it's all about because the experience of driving topless is not all it would appear to be cracked up to be. 

You'd think it would be. I mean, what wouldn't there be to love? Top down, the wind in your hair, you and perhaps your passenger or passengers becoming one with mother nature's song. Doesn't that sound lovely? It does. Then reality sets in. Trust me, I currently own two-convertibles, which is ironic since I'm not a convertible girl per se, so I know a thing or ten about convertible motoring. 

First off, if you live up here on the cusp of the North Pole, "convertible season" is incredibly short; shorter than "pool season" which is, on paper, Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend but more like the Fourth of July through Labor Day. You drop the top on any day outside of that window and the wind chill will have you pulling over the first chance you get to put the top back up. My wife and I both have hoodies stashed in our 1991 Corvette convertible "just in case". Perfect weather can feel less so once the wind hits you. 

In the height of summer, even up here, with the top down, the sun will broil you. We drove with the top down on an anniversary weekend trip to Toronto several years ago in my wife's 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder GTS and I got sun sick so bad I nearly threw up at the border. The poutine didn't help either. 

On the open road, though, when the weather is perfect, even at night, driving a convertible can be a clandestine experience. Again, problem up here is those moments are few and far between. Also, most convertibles with fabric tops like ours both have and this car has, are much noisier inside than their comparable fixed roof versions. Head room is also compromised with the top up. 

The biggest problem with this car, though, is not its after-market chopped top - it's the fact it's powered by Cadillac's infamous "Northstar" V-8 engine. Especially one with 95,000-miles on it and the seller asking $14,000 for it. The "low refrigerant" light is on too. Bruh, seriously? The problems with these engines are well documented which is a shame since when they're not eating their head gaskets, they're wonderfully smooth and powerful. Until they're not. The fix is expensive and I've yet to see anyone swap in a different engine into these cars and have everything work right. 

Sadly, someone who doesn't know about the Cadillac Northstar will buy this and hopefully they won't soon be sorry.