1957 Ford Fairlane convertible, 1961 Ford Thunderbird and other clean used cars

 The '77 Malibu from my last post was from the Shoreline used car dealer who happens to sell a lot of vintage cars. Don't know where he gets them.

 

Ford sold more cars in 1957 than Chevy, but a '57 Bel Air convertible is worth three times as much as the Fairlane convertible from that year.

 

There's no mistaking a Thunderbird for any other car.

 

More from the bigger is better era: 1962 Chevrolet Impala with 283 v-8.

1977 Chevrolet El Camino. If the classic car-truck is your jam, and you're on a budget.

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The Dinosaur lumbers on: 1977 Chevrolet Malibu Classic

 

 

There's a good article on curbside.com comparing this car to that year's Honda Accord: "GM’s mega-mid-sized cars of the seventies were the perfect embodiment of why cars like the Accord started (to) take the country by storm. The Colonnades were longer, wider and heavier than full-sized Chevys not that many years earlier. Their arrival in 1973 on the eve of the energy crisis didn’t help, but it’s not completely fair to say that GM didn’t have any idea which way the wind was blowing. Small cars were already booming, and GM launched its own Vega just two years earlier." "The real shocker was space utilization. These two-ton coupes had little if any advantage over the tiny Accord, save for width. The rear seat was a veritable cave, lacking visibility, light or adequate leg room."

As the author above notes, GM wasn't just building gas-guzzling behemoths. It was trying, in a half-hearted way, to join the smaller car revolution. Two problems. One, the company didn't really want to build compact cars and those they offered to public were just terrible (the Vega, the Chevette). This of course led the next generation of American buyers to be even more open to imported makes. Two, yeah, GM was also getting ready to join the movement to lighter, more space-efficient front-wheel drive cars. But that of course led to the infamous 1980 Chevy Citation, another terrible car that, like so many of GM's products from the 80s, eventually led buyers by the millions to abandon the brand.

Note the above car is for sale. I'll cover this particular used car lot in my next post.

 

 

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Where the 70s Survived: 1978 Chevy Van

It's hard to wrap your mind around American culture of the 1970s. What to say about the forgotten phenomenon of the custom van?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From flashbak.com: "There were no minivans in the 1970s.  This was a time before the van had been tamed, before it had been neutered into the soccer-mom machine that it is today.  In the 1970s, vans didn’t carry spoiled kids drinking juice-boxes and watching Spongebob…. quite the contrary.  Vans were basically a bedroom on wheels.  No Spongebob, no juice boxes, no trips to organized sporting events in the suburbs…. just lots of sex and recreational drug use.  You might say the 1970s full size van was the crazy uncle of the modern minivan – the uncle that lived dangerously in the 70s, then flamed out at decade’s end.

In the 1970s, many van owners took their shaggin’ wagons seriously and tricked them out to the limit: Big shiny sidepipes with mellow sound, plush interior carpeting for maximum fornication, duals to amp up the horsepower,…. and, perhaps most importantly, the artwork on the sides….

The vans of the 1970s were decorated with airbrushed psychedelic wizards, doobie smoking dragons, naked slave girls, flaming unicorns… the trippier the better.  I reiterate – this was not your mom’s minivan.  This was a place where “bad” things happen, and the designs were warning signs.  Get into the back of a van with an airbrushed Grim Reaper in a land of mushrooms and naked fairies, and you should know what your (sic) getting into."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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