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This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition , where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot . Today we've got some shots by Project Car Hell Poster Child and serial tipster Franzouse , whose Paris wanderings led him to this riot-proof Kadett. Is Franzouse channeling the spirit of former Alameda High School student and current- in fact, permanent - Paris resident, Jim Morrison, with all these Alameda-grade DOTSBE finds? Make the jump to see all the photos and read his description of this fine piece of German automotive craftsmanship. galleryPost('DOTSBEKrackKadett', 7, 'Krack Kadett Down On The Paris Street'); Went for a walk yesterday, daytime for once, and I wound up in a neighborhood I usually stay away from, the champs Elysées. Attempting to steer away from that pickpocket cesspool, I veered off and found myself on the Avenue Gabriel, which borders the back wall of the garden of the President's Elysée Palace...
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The AMC Pacer looks crazy from any angle; as we saw in the DOTS '76 Pacer , it's pretty much impossible to tell if you're getting lens distortion when you photograph- regardless of angle- due to its weird bulbous appearance. Jean-Charles, the French distributor for the Pacer, figured the best approach was to demonstrate how not all big round objects look bad. Image source: Wikipedia
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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! I really wanted to call today's matchup Édition Débâcle , but the heads of our beloved Server Hamsters tend to explode when they're forced to deal with weird furrin letters in our headlines, and headless hamsters don't run on wheels. Never mind the English-only hamsters, though, because we've got to choose between two equally impossible desirable French cars. I tell you what, every time I see that three-across seating layout of the Matra Bagheera , it makes me ache for a Bagheera to call my own. You figure all the possible automotive seating layouts had been established a century ago, and then here come the French with a totally new approach. Sure, it's a crazy approach, but that's why we love French cars so much! The Murena was the successor to the Bagheera, and the seller of this '80 Matra Murena is quick to point out that "Only...
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newVideoPlayer("/Citroen_GSX_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Once you drop off the old man at the (train station? whorehouse?), the Citroën GSX turns you into a total menace on the roads; you'll be beating your chest and howling- and we mean literally howling- with the sheer macho joy of its mighty 65-horsepower engine. It's too bad we found this ad after selecting the entrants for the Best Car Ads Of The 1970s poll , because we think it would have made a strong showing in the vote.
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newVideoPlayer("Citroen_GS_Shaddock_476.flv", 506, 423,""); We don't speak Cartoon French around here, but it's pretty clear what's going on in this edition of Classic Ad Watch: the hapless shaddock makes the mistake of attempting to drive a car equipped with a spring-based suspension, is hurled into a tree and suffers head and leg injuries as a result. Better to drive a Citroën GS (such as the one we saw down on the Alameda street last week ), which protects large sentient citrus fruit from harm with its suspension hydropneumatique! Thanks to Franzouse for the tip.
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After looking at that poor sad Peugeot in the junkyard yesterday, I decided that the '91 Peugeot 405 parked a few blocks from my house now qualifies for DOTS, 17 years old or not. I grabbed my camera and headed out on foot, taking my usual roundabout route in order to maximize discovery of new DOTSworthy machinery. Down a side street, I caught sight of some extremely French-looking taillights on a car parked in the distance. Could it possibly be... a Citroën? The DOTS Holy Grail? Yes! Actually, the real DOTS Holy Grail would be a Wankel-powered Citroën (or, better still, my all-time favorite musclecar: the '69 SC/Rambler), but finding this thing really made my day. The Citroën GS was made from 1970 through 1986; I suspect this is a mid-to-late-70s car, but can't say for sure. It's still got European plates (and a California temporary registration sticker in the rear window), so most likely it's a recent immigrant and the owner is still battling the DMV to get it fully...
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We've been getting some great Down On The Street Bonus Edition photos from our readers (so many, in fact, that it's getting tough to post them as fast as they come in- which is a good problem to have). However, when you find and photograph a daily-driven Citröen Traction-Avant on the streets of your city, you get jumped to the head of the line. Such is the case with Warpig , who has gone on an unprecedented DOTSBE binge in his hometown of Oslo, Norway. He's sent in literally hundreds of photos of interesting old cars found on Oslo's streets, and today we're going to look at some of the Citröens he's shot. Good work, Warpig, and we'll be showing more of your photos in the near future! galleryPost('DOTSBEOsloCitroens', 9, 'French Machinery Down On The Oslo Street');
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In a stunning upset, the Borgward Hansa wagon handed Germany a one-sided victory over the Peugeot 304 in our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll . With France long reigning as the world's lone HyperGalactic PCH OmniPower, we would be remiss if we didn't give the French a shot at prying the oil-leaking, stripped-fastener-thread PCH CryptoChampion trophy from the Germans, in order to prove that the Borgward's victory wasn't just some one-shot fluke. That's why we're rolling out some Hell Project heavy artillery today, with a pair of undeniably cool- yet just as undeniably nightmarish- machines vying for long-term residency in your Garage Of Torture. It wouldn't be fair to break out the H-bomb of French Hell Projects (the Citröen SM ), because we're fairly certain that nothing on the planet can beat the SM in a Project Car Hell matchup. But how about the Citröen CX ? The early CX has many of the features that made the SM so wonderful and terrible, but with...
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The plan was to have the PCH superpower whose vehicle won yesterday's Choose Your Eternity challenge pit one of its finest, most hellish machines against an offering from the remaining PCH superpower, France. Unfortunately, the Gawker poll thingy appears to have been designed by Joe Lucas , and the 2-0 tally in favor of the Austin Gipsy seems even shakier than Kennedy in Illinois, 1960, or Bush in Florida, 2000. Anyway, it's been a month since our last all-French matchup , so let's just postpone the showdown between Italy, Britain, and France for another day. Back when I was a young college hoon with a lifetime-unemployment-ensuring art/English double major, my state-funded university went ahead and took a bunch of California taxpayers' money and bought Yale's English Department. They got the works, right down to the office furniture and some French dude named Jacques Derrida . Suddenly, being an English major meant that you had to get serious about literary theory in...
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newVideoPlayer("Austin_Princess-476.flv", 475, 376); After seeing James May torturing himself with that British Leyland stalwart, the Austin Princess, on a recent Top Gear episode , we realized there's far more to the Malaise Era than 140-horse big blocks and tape-striped Brougham Edition Detroit land yachts. Thanks to British Leyland's inimitable devotion to engineering and build quality, the Princess set a new standard for, uh, luxury? Here we see how a Princess jaunt to the Continent with one's driver can lead to reversal of class roles and the possibility of Hot French Hitchhiker adventures.
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