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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. There's been just one Corvette so far in this series (also a '73), and I assume so few are on the street for the same reason so few first-generation Camaros are on the street: Car Show Guys! Yes, most old Corvettes now live in garages, emerging only for shows and cruise nights; I'm thinking of shooting a few early C4s for this series, but even those are pretty hard to find parked on the street these days. This car is in pretty nice shape and worth plenty, yet here it is parked on the street in Alameda's West End. I don't see it every day, so I suspect it lives at least part-time in a garage somewhere. It does get used for transportation, much to the envy of all those gilded-cage show/cruise-only Vettes. This is the first Malaise Era Corvette, with power out of the standard 350 down to 190 horsepower. Some of that power loss was...
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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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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. With all the cool cars and trucks we've seen in this series, it may come as a shock to some that the first-ever DOTS car- that is, the first use of "Down On The Street" as the name- was this Cadillac Cimarron d'Oro , shot with a seriously crappy cellphone camera. Since that time, I've been packing better photographic hardware and keeping an eye open for another Cimarron… and now I've got one! What's the difference between the '85 Chevy Cavalier and the '85 Cadillac Cimarron? Some emblems, some leather… oh, and an extra $7,045- more than twice the cost of the $6,477 Cavalier (though the $560 cost of the optional V6 pushed the Chevy's price up to just about exactly half that of the Cad). The General's management, already reeling from relentless Japanese competition, the Fiero fiasco, and a bad case of Cerebral...
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