1965 Volkswagen Samba

With 23-windows and a ragtop roof, a restored Samba can command $100,000 or more in today's market. As the second picture shows, the microbus was and still is available in a whole bunch of different configurations.

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1965 Chevrolet Chevelle Station Wagon

Old wagons are rare. Plenty were built, few survived. Go look for '55 Thunderbird. A search will quickly turn up dozens for sale. Then try to find a '79 Olds Cutlass wagon for sale. There aren't any.

A fair number of Chevelle wagons have survived; it's a pretty cool car. This is a base model Chevelle, it is not the more common Malibu trim. It appears the owner has dropped in the top engine from that era, the 396 V8. Pretty sure it did not come from the factory with that.

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1965 Saab 96

Seems like a good time to write my first ever post on Saab, as Saab was in the news recently (although not in a good way).

Made for two decades, the Saab 96 is a curious vehicle with a two-stroke engine, front-wheel drive, column-shifting transmission and a 'freewheel' overrunning clutch, allowing the engine when coasting to reduce its speed to idling, thus requiring only the small lubrication available from the closed, coasting, throttle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So where did the company go? In 1989, (from The Guardian), General Motors, "panic-bought Saab... ­after losing out in bids to acquire Land Rover, Volvo and Jaguar." GM had actually bought 50% of the company at that time, and purchased the remaining 50% in 2000. That year, Saab sold a record 133,000 cars worldwide. Following GM's bankruptcy, it sold Saab to Swedish sports car maker Spyker. That tiny company's attempt to keep Saab going was a failure from day one; and because GM wouldn't allow Spyker to include the GM technology in Saab cars as part of any sale of the company, Saab filed for bankruptcy. 

Saab's assets were then purchased by a Chinese company who announced the brand name National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS). That company's plan was to restart production of the Saab 9-3, first as a gasoline powered car, then switching to electric. Long story short, after producing a handful of electric cars, the NEVS project is over and the company is trying to sell its Saab assets. While in theory the Saab brand could rise from the ashes yet again, it seems unlikely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The logo above represents that Saabs are the cars "born from jets". The car company was started in excess factory space by Saab Aviation.

 

 

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Welcome to Budget Germany: 1971 Prosche 914, 1965 Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle

I have never featured a Porsche on this blog before. There's a reason for that: I think vintage Porsches are junk. And I drove enough of them in my valet parking days to know. Consider the famous Porsche 911. When Road & Track reviewed it in the 1960s, they found the car's handling so poor it was dangerous to drive. So Porsche fixed this... by dropping two 40-lb. steel weights into the front bumper. Even after a couple of generations of improvements, the 911 was still known for dangerous over-steer, stalling when cold, and (from drivetribe.com), "the early 4-speed manual transmission had exceptionally tall gears, making the driver be careful with shifting gears". What the heck does that even mean? I also drove Porsche 944's made in the '80s, and was shocked at the poor build quality. This is a premium-price supercar?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet the old 911 and 944 really are supercars compared to the lowly Porsche 914. From jalopnik.com, "The problem (with the 914) was that the engine they went with was the air-cooled 1.7-liter, 80-horsepower flat four from the Volkswagen Type 4 sedan. This was in no way a performance engine, and it showed. Even in the 914's lightweight body, 0-to-60 mph came at a lofty 13 seconds, giving the driver plenty of time to wonder if his or her purchase was really good idea.

But perhaps the 914's biggest problem was one of perception. With all of its VW components, many enthusiasts refused to accept it as a "real Porsche." It also suffered from a poor shift linkage, somewhat awkward styling and cut-rate quality that reflected its low-cost, parts bin origins. The car was not well received by the motoring press at the time."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Time is an illusion. 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood, 1955 Ford Fairlane, 1965 Plymouth Barracuda

There are some neighborhoods in Seattle where you can street store the cars you're (slowly) restoring.

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1965 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport

The '65 Impala was a great looking car, but I feel like it was all down hill from here. After that year, the Impala kept getting bigger. (Why? This car is huge!) It also started getting a more "formal" look. By 1971, forget it - that Impala was a land yacht.
* '65 was the last year for the round tail lights.
* The Super Sport package did not automatically mean a big V-8. Some Impala SS cars have a straight 6!

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1965 Oldsmobile F-85

A favorite of mine, people tend to think of this as the Cutlass. But in these years, Cutlass was not a model, but an "appearance package." Thus it's possible to find for example the legendary 442 performance package on an F-85 fixed pillar coupe without the Cutlass package, as well as on the more common F-85 Cutlass Holiday hardtop.

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1965 Ford Mustang GT

This superb Mustang has nearly every option, including air conditioning.

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1960 Volvo PV544 and 1965 Volvo PV544 Sport

Seattle loves old Volvos. In 1944, Volvo introduced the PV444, a remarkably modern car with unibody construction and coil spring suspension. Deciding not to mess with a good thing, this car remained in production virtually unchanged for more than twenty years.

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1965 Mercury Econoline van

Yes, I said Mercury. In Canada, many towns had a Ford dealership or a Lincoln-Mercury dealership but not both. Ford addressed this by letting Ford dealers sell the upscale Mercury as the Monarch. Mercury dealers sold Ford trucks and vans as Mercurys and Ford cars under the brand name Meteor. Ford wound down the separate branding after the US and Canada signed a free trade agreement in 1968.

This is the first Ford cab-over van. It's based on the Falcon chassis, which seems like a daft idea to me considering what a wimpy vehicle the Falcon was. Ford's inline 6-cylinders were the only engines available; you can see the motor mounted over the front axle between the seats.

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1965 Corvette convertible fuel-injected

Glory days at General Motors: You're looking at the final edition of the only reliable non-electronic fuel-injection system ever put in a mass-produced car.

The basic problems in using fuel-injection without an advance control system were evident in the first fuel-injected car, the 1955 Mercedes 300 SL. From Wikipedia, "unlike today's electrically powered fuel injection systems, the 300 SL's mechanical fuel pump would continue to inject gasoline into the engine during the interval between shutting off the ignition and the engine's coming to a stop; this unburned gasoline washed lubricating oil from the cylinder walls, which not only left them unprotected in affected areas during start-up but would dilute the engine's entire oil supply if the car was not driven hard or long enough to reach a sufficient temperature to evaporate the gas out of the oil."

At this same time, the Bendix Corporation said, "No problem, we'll just build electronic fuel-injection." The Bendix system worked, provided the car owner kept a team of genius engineers and mechanics on hand at all times. American Motors promised a Rambler with Bendix fuel-injection in 1956, but never made it past the show car stage; no one has ever been able to find any of the fuel-injected Ramblers. In 1958 Chrysler made the same promise and actually built and sold a handful of Bendix system cars; all of them were recalled when it was clear the system was not reliable in daily use. One of these cars, a DeSoto convertible, has been restored.

In 1957 GM introduced its own mechanically-controlled fuel-injection. It was powerful (the first engine developing one horsepower per square inch of displacement), it was reliable (for those who could take the time to understand its complicated construction) and it got great gas mileage. The problem was that it cost almost $5,000 in 2018 dollars and those wanting to go fast found it easier to just buy a bigger engine with a couple of gas-guzzling 4-barrel carburetors. It's no coincidence that 1965, the last year the GM fuel-injection system was made for the Corvette 327 V-8, was also the same year that buyers could get the 396 c.i. big-block in that same car.

For the record, the engine you're looking at was available in full-size Chevy's from 1957 to 1959, Corvettes from 1957 to 1965 and in the Pontiac Bonneville in 1957 and 1958.

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1965 Mercedes 190

Also known as the Finback, the W110/190 was the first car to be designed with crumple zones and extensively crash tested. I see a lot of these around, suggesting they must be hard to kill. The owner of this particular car wanted to keep it around badly enough that he replaced the front fenders and hood with sheet metal from two other cars.

 

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Ford Ranchero roundup!

It seems like Ford put an awful lot of expense and effort into their car-truck in the 1960s when you consider that it was never built in large numbers, required a lot of parts that weren't applicable to any other model, and that the Ranchero changed a lot from year to year. In fact, the Ranchero was made in 5 different models between 1965 and 1968.

The 1965 Ranchero (first car pictured below) was based on the Falcon compact. In 1966, it was based on the new, larger Falcon and had two models in the same year. The first had the same front clip as the Falcon, and the second had the front clip from the Ford Fairlane. In 1967, the Ranchero was based on the Fairlane (second car pictured below). Then in 1968 it moved to the completely different Torino platform (the third car pictured below is a Torino-based 1970, and the last car is a 1974) before finally moving to the huge LTD platform in 1977 with the final Ranchero being built in 1979.

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1965 Volvo 1800S

   

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