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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. I've been looking for a DOTS-worthy Subaru for a long time, but it seems that most of the 70s and 80s examples were crushed long ago. While I'd prefer a BRAT, we'll have to settle for this Justy. First, let's listen to the song I always hear in my head when contemplating a tiny Subaru from the days before mall parking lots were full of the things. Dr. Demento was a big fan of this tune, of course: I've driven a couple of these cars, and "underpowered" doesn't really do that 66-horsepower 3-cylinder justice. In fact, the only post-WW2 vehicle I've ever driven that was slower than the Justy was the VW Rabbit Diesel my high school used for driver training class. But so what? This thing can probably cross several counties on a shotglass of fuel, and it proves that you don't need a Sprint for 3-cylinder 80s action...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. The VW van is a fairly common sight in Alameda, so much so that I keep passing by most T2 Transporters without stopping to photograph them (we've seen numerous T1 buses: 1956 , 1957 , 1960 , 1966 , and 1967 ). I'd been contemplating the inclusion of an early water-cooled Volkswagen van in this series- but still wasn't convinced they belonged - when I spotted this super-clean '87 Vanagon Syncro parked just across the street from the 1957 Cadillac . I'm convinced now; it's Vanagon Monday today! The four-wheel-drive Syncro didn't sell at all well in North America, no doubt because Detroit and Japan were filling showrooms with burly off-road hardware that made the VW look like something only Yurp-lovin' effete snobs (not to mention nattering nabobs of negativism) would choose to drive. South Africans loved the Syncro so...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. We've only seen one Mercedes-Benz R107 so far, though they were made from 1972 through 1989 . I see them around town, but they've just always seemed so timeless that I tend not to notice them while I'm out looking for cars to shoot. Today we're going to look at a Late Reagan Era R107, one of the very last of the series. How much did this car cost new? $55,300, or 107 grand in today's dollars. That's $3,600 less than a Porsche 928. The Porsche gave you 316 horsepower versus 238 for the Benz, but which one would most impress your co-conspirators at a collapsing S&L? Exactly . This one's not in what you'd call pristine shape, but it looks pretty good and gets driven. I know of a pretty solid W113 not far from this car, so we'll be seeing a pagoda roof pretty soon. galleryPost('DOTS87560SL', 15, '1987...
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This series has included quite a few Porsches so far, with a 356 , some 912s , a couple of 928s , a pair of 914s , and- of course- a bunch of 911s . But what about the 944? Porsche sold quite a few of them, and not all have been turned into $500 race cars . For whatever reason, I just haven't found any 944s in Alameda... until now. Porsche definitely got into the 80s thing with the sell-the-brand-name backlit PORSCHE lettering on the back of the 944. The 944 is a beautifully engineered car, with near-perfect front/rear weight distribution and lots of shiny aluminum stuff... but just try to work on one! No, don't! You can buy a pretty clean 944 for peanuts (the '87 944S listed for $28,250 new, a few hundred bucks cheaper than the '87 Buick GNX), but the bill to replace a timing belt or clutch pushes the cost of ownership orders of magnitude higher. This example seems to drive every day and looks decent in spite of paint fried by the California sun. Now I need to find a 9...
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You have no idea, dear readers, how long I hunted- perhaps stalked is the more accurate term- this Mitsubishi. Starions are very rare these days, I wanted to shoot one in Alameda for this series, and here was this primered-out specimen living just a few blocks from my house (on the same block, in fact, as the '87 Corolla FX16 GT-S ). Unfortunately, its owner clearly uses it as a daily driver, and his work hours seem to coincide exactly with the daylight hours. All fall and winter I waited, and with the onset of the longer days of spring I was finally able to catch this Starion, parked and with photography-friendly lighting (if only I could have the same success with that '76 Olds Starfire that keeps evading my camera). What's not to like about a rear-drive machine with a big turbocharged Astron engine, Japanese build quality, and perhaps the most Eighties styling ever put into an automobile? Depending on the model you got, the Starion's engine was good for 145 or 176 horsepower...
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Back when we had our What's the Cutoff Year For Japanese DOTS Cars poll , the image I used as an example was this '87 Honda Civic 4WD wagon. I'd meant to DOTS-ize this car soon afterward, but I kept getting distracted by cars and trucks that seemed so much more, well, interesting . But 3rd-gen four-wheel-drive Civics are rare and weird- hardly anyone bought them new, they turned into red powder in the rusty parts of the world, and California's stringent emissions tests have doomed many 80s Civics (some of which have the most complicated tangle of vacuum hoses ever placed in an engine compartment ) to the cold jaws of The Crusher. So here we go- today the little four-wheelin' Civic gets to shine! And, since we had a DOTS Car of the Week Poll last Friday, let's have one today- after you check out the gallery, make your vote count! 1987 was the first year of Honda's so-called "Real Time" four-wheel-drive system, which engaged automatically. Toyota's...
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It was bad enough to go a month without a Chrysler A-Body in this series, but two months with no BMWs? That's how long it's been! I've got several 2002s photographed (and I've been stalking a 1502 that roams the island), but all the recent K.I.T.T. talk around these parts has me feeling mighty Eighties. That means we need to don our Members Only jackets, put on our Vuarnet shades, apply some ointment to our suppurating herpes sores (wait, is herpes more of a 70s thing? OK, make that chlamydia!), brush up on our Oliver North quips, and take a look at that beautifully apt symbol of Eighties excess: the 1987 BMW L6. galleryPost('DOTS87L6Top', 6, '1987 BMW L6 Down On The Street Part 1'); Even though I was living in dirty-S&L-money-drenched Orange County in the mid-80s and no doubt saw hundreds of these things back in the day, I have only the faintest memories of the BMW L6. When I first spotted this car, I thought the L6 emblem was actually an I 6 emblem...
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Does a 20-year-old car qualify for this series? In the case of the Merkur XR4Ti, I think it does- these things were pretty rare to begin with, and time has not been kind to the few that Ford did manage to sell. Sure, it was actually an Americanized Ford Sierra- common as hell in Europe at the time- but there were Dearborn dreams of the thing seeming exotic enough to swipe sales from the Germans and Japanese on these shores. This example, spotted in Alameda's East End, is in excellent shape- could it be someone has painstakingly restored a Merkur? Still, the XR4Ti had some cool stuff you didn't much see coming from Detroit at the time. A turbocharged SOHC engine, for example, and something we still don't see on the Mustang 20 years later: an independent rear suspension. See, folks, this is an import! Ford Werke AG had nothing to do with those boring ol' Tempos you see clogging your local highways, really! And the double spoilers! Isn't this rig the 80s-est thing you've...
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