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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 seen our share of Porsches in this series, mostly 911s and 912s but with a handful of water-cooled jobs thrown in. So far I've been unable to find any 924s, but today we'll add another 9 4 4 to the lone '87 we've already got. I found this '85 parked on the same block as the '80 Volvo 244 and just around the corner from the silver '67 Porsche 912 . It's plenty rough, with sun-bleached paint and lots of dents, and it never seems to move from this spot. Did the dreaded $1,000 timing belt let go? Is it unable to pass the smog test? The tags expire on Halloween, so action will need to be taken soon. This was the most affordable Porsche you could get in 1985, its $21,440 price tag less than half the size of the 928's and ten grand lower than the cheapest 911. That still wasn't cheap; you could have bought...
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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 had a real Mazda shortage around these parts, probably because the early rotaries tended to blow out the apex seals and/or suck gas and thus didn't weather the decades quite as well as their piston-engine competition. There's been an '81 RX-7 (plus one non-Wankel '82 Mazda ) and that's been it until today. I've decided to go deeper into the 80s to enable more RX-7s to qualify for this series, because they were great cars on the street (and on the racetrack ) and deserve our respect. Sure, it was a nightmare to make the Wankel pass America's ever-toughening smog standards (and let's not even mention the complexity of the later RX-7 Turbo's emissions gear), but the power-to-weight of that little engine was nuts . The '85 GSL weighed a mere 2,345 pounds and went pretty well with 101 horses. However, the...
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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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We saw an AE86 Toyota with Sprinter badging earlier in this series, and now I've found one with a single Trueno emblem just a few blocks away. This '85 seems to have had the US-spec front bumper replaced with a JDM assembly, but I'm pretty sure this car was originally sold in the US. It's always good to see an AE86 still driving, since most of these things have been thoroughly hooned by two generations of leadfooted import fanatics and they're getting mighty tough to find. It's been lowered a bit and sports the obligatory large exhaust tip, but overall it looks quite intact. Perhaps it spent the first 20 or so years of its life as a sedate daily driver. I saw quite a few of these emblems at the Motoring J Style show a month ago. Hey, do you think we'll start seeing Echos with Platz emblems? Avalons with Pronard badging? Yes, that's a NorCal Drift Academy T-shirt being used as a seat cover; let's hope the owner of this car keeps the body in one piece and...
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When you start the week with an old Datsun , why not end it with an old Toyota? Somehow, though, the mid-80s Supra doesn't feel all that old, in spite of its incredibly 80s lines and graphics. We saw a good example of its 4-cylinder sibling (or maybe "cousin" is a better way of describing the Celica/Supra relationship of the era) a while back, and this Toyota lives across town, near the '65 Mustang . Check out that super-80s decal emblem! Pay no mind to the large-diameter tailpipe; that fad will be gone long before all the old Supras disappear. The hatch spoiler! But don't laugh- a Supra just like this one won the Flat Rock 24 Hours of LeMons last year. This one is on the battered side, but you know there's plenty of life left in it. Being forced to choose between one of these and a Starion would be quite the 80s dilemma. galleryPost('DOTS85ToySupra', 15, '1985 Toyota Supra Down On The Street'); DOTS 1-200 • DOTS 201-250
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When we had the Detroit Malaise Poll (which, by the way, was won by the beautiful T-top-equipped '78 Eldorado ), I realized that I had no Late Malaise Detroit cars in this series. In fact, other than the '80 IHC Scout , we haven't had any 80s American vehicles here. To remedy this situation, I grabbed my camera and started walking, intending to shoot the first DOTS-worthy 80s Detroit car I found... and I didn't have to go far before I spotted an example of GM's coulda-been-a-contender mid-engine car... I should have known I'd find a good car on this block, since so many other DOTS cars live on it. You can see the '80 Porsche 911SC in the background here, and the '66 Beetle convertible , '78 Civic , and '73 Plymouth Scamp live on the same block as well. I can't believe this huge mirrored trim panel was a factory item... oh, wait- it was 1985! Thinking about the Fiero always makes me feel a bit sad, because it was under development during my formative...
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While we had an 80s Toyota on DOTS just last week , we're really overdue to see an example of one of my all-time favorite Toyotas: the '83-86 Tercel Wagon. I've owned more of these than any other kind of car (admittedly, most were City Tow auction cars I turned around quickly, but I had a couple of drivers I kept for quite a while). I've always had a soft spot for funky old Toyotas (maybe because my very first car was a '69 Corona) and it saddens me to see how their cars have lost so much soul since the Tercel wagons, AE86s, and small pickups of the mid-1980s. The crazy thing about these cars was that the funky drivetrain setup actually worked pretty well. You had a longitudinally-mounted engine sending its two-digit horsepower back to a weirdo V-drive-style transmission , with a little tiny differential under the engine oil pan and a driveshaft going back to the rear axle (the 2WD cars seemed to have the same transmission with the rear output shaft deleted). The front...
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After we saw our fourth DOTS Volvo (a clean 1970 164 ) last week, there was some grumbling by Saab fans that I seem to think the only cars from Sweden are Volvos. In fact, the ugly truth is that there are very few old Saabs in Alameda; however, I went out with the camera the other day, determined to find at least one Saab older than 20 years on the island. Block after block I trudged, stumbling across all manner of cool old Detroit iron to shoot... but the only Saabs I could find were 1990s or newer. Finally, my bleary eyes beheld this vision in white. Victory! Of course, now I'm on a misson! Somewhere on the island lurks a Saab 95 or 99, and I'm going to photograph it. The '85 Saab 900 4-door sold new for $12,170 ($23,771 in 2007 dollars). That wasn't ridiculously expensive, but by the mid-80s the Japanese competition was thudding brutal punches straight to Saab's kidneys and buyers in a Swedish mood seemed to favor the more expensive Volvos. At least, that's the...
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While out on a burrito-obtainment mission on Alameda 's main drag, I caught sight of a small 80s station wagon that looked somehow... odd. At first I thought it was some sort of oddball version of the Camry or maybe even a Celebrity, but when I got close I realized I was experiencing a rare VW Quantum sighting. Well, such sightings are rare in the United States, anyway. This is the newest car yet in the Down On The Street series, but the point isn't the car's age, it's the fact that it's a rare survivor of a bygone era. This car certainly qualifies, especially considering that (water-cooled) VW Years are sort of like dog years; one year of wear and tear on, say, a Japanese car is roughly equal to seven years on a post-air-cooled Volkswagen . The Quantum was the second name VW slapped on the Passat (succeeding the Dasher nameplate) when they tried to sell their "big" car on these shores, apparently figuring Americans would never buy cars with weird European-sounding names. In '85, the Quantum...
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