Festival of the Unexceptional: ordinary old cars

My uncle had a 900 Turbo. It was a lovely car.

Ah, yes. The same thing happened here last year. I'm not missing ours: they were ugly, boring things. But the British ones I always thought were a lovely design. It'll be a shame to see them go.

I wish we had free car tax for hybrids here. All we have is a couple of "hybrid only" spaces at Coogee beach (about 50 metres from the back of the beach on this picture), and that's about it.

 

Fair enough. My experience of North American Chryslers is not pretty. It all happened over two days, when I was on holiday with my parents and my sister.

We picked up a hire car from Avis at JFK. The first car was not a Chrysler. It was a Chevrolet Celebrity station wagon.



We got to the car park exit, and someone checked our paperwork, and it turned out they'd given us the wrong car. So we had to go back to the space, get everything out, and go back to the desk. They gave us a Pontiac 6000.



So we drove that to Manhattan on the way to our hotel. This was our first visit to New York. One of the things we were looking out for was the steam coming out of the manhole covers from that city heating system. We stopped at traffic lights, and Dad said, "Hey, look, kids! We must have stopped above one of those steaming manhole covers! There's steam coming out from under the car" We thought that was cool. At the next lights, Dad said, "Hey, look kids! There's a coincidence! We must have stopped above another steaming manhole cover!". At the third set of lights, Dad said. "Hmmm.... I think there might be a problem."

So we went to an Avis office in the city. We did more paperwork, and got another car. It was a Chrysler Caravelle.



We drove that for 20 minutes. It got hotter and hotter. It turned out that the heater was jammed on. We were driving to Florida, so this wasn't ideal.

So we took it back.

They gave us a small car to use for the day, but we couldn't fit all our luggage in. It was the only car they had left, and they told us they'd get us something else the next day. So we got some tiny Plymouth. It was noisy and uncomfortable, and my sister and I could barely fit in the back. I can't find a picture of it.

And the day after that, we got a Chevrolet Celebrity Coupe.



That was what we drove from New York to Niagara Falls to Washington DC to Jacksonville. It wasn't perfect either: we got pulled over by a cop for faulty brake lights. Also, I remember Dad cursing it for being hopelessly slow.

I lost a lot of my faith in American cars that week.

 

Ah, yes. But I suspect the other beachgoers might be less than thrilled.

 

Here are a couple more Telegraph articles you might like in the light of this and your other post.

Invest in an affordable future classic car - Telegraph
This one's about affordable future classics, and the Peugeot 205 (the GTi version) is in there.

Video: 30 years of the Austin Montego - Telegraph
And this one's all about the classic that is the Montego.




And in the light of this post....

.... There's this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/classiccars/10681277/Police-cars-of-yesteryear.html
Some old British police cars.

 

I'm going to revive this thread, because I've just seen an article about this year's Festival Of The Unexceptional.

Concours de l'Ordinaire – full roundup from the Festival of the Unexceptional 2017



@RCO wasn't around when this thread was last going, so I thought he might appreciate it.

That Renault 5 reminds me ..... my Easter holiday in Iran was great for unexceptional European cars of yesteryear: lots of rehashed Hillman Hunters (Paykans) and Renault 5s (Pars Khodros) and Peugeot 405s (Peugeot Pars), among other things.

 

My auntie and uncle had a Hillman Hunter when I was a kid. It was about a three-hour drive from where they lived, near Glasgow, to where we lived, near Blackpool. They visited us a lot, and we visited them a lot. I don't think they ever made it to our house and back without that Hillman breaking down. It was dire.

I got one as a taxi in Shiraz this year. It was so badly-made that the driver had put a metal girder across the rear footwell and welded it to the B-pillars to hold the car together.

The big Rootes-Hillman-Talbot-Chrysler factory in Linwood (no more! Which reminds me - there's another song for the "Protest Song" thread) was very close to where lots of my great-aunts and great-uncles lived and made ice-cream, though. It was Rootes-Hillman-Talbot-Chrysler-let's-face-it-mostly-government-subsidy money that bought a lot of our family's ice cream.

Still, we had two Talbot Alpines, and they were surprisingly reliable. One of them got my parents, my sister, my Gran and I all the way to Ischia (in the Bay of Naples) and back in reasonable comfort. (Not the bits across the sea, obviously. It did that on hovercrafts and boats.) Not a handsome car, mind you.

Uncle Matt replaced his terrible Hillman Hunter with an even-worse Austin All-aggro. There were several times he and my auntie and my cousins arrived at our house in a breakdown truck with the All-aggro on the back.

Have you been through the rest of this old thread? @Grumpy cabbie (who, sadly, seems to have deregistered, as the link didn't pop up then) had some fine reminiscences about BL's products.

MG was eventually part of BL and then Austin Rover / Rover Group. It was bought by Nanjing Automotive Industry Corp at about the same time that what was left of Rover Group (other than Jaguar Land Rover, which went to Ford and then Tata, and Mini, which went to BMW) was sold to Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. SAIC later bought NAIC, so MG and Rover are back together. But now Rover uses the name Roewe, for no apparent reason, and still makes a version of the Rover 75 for the Chinese market.



MG is selling in Britain again, but its cars are Chinese, and MG no longer stands for Morris Garages, according to SAIC, but for "Modern Gentleman".

Yep. You'll get no argument from me there.

 

Fantastic picture. Is that in LA?

 

Ahha. The photo gallery from the original article - which had been a 500 error - is now working. It's at Festival of the Unexceptional 2017 – a glorious celebration of ordinary cars, in pictures - Cars.

It's well worth a look to see some ordinary cars from Britain and the rest of Europe.

These were my favourites.


Gosh, what a range of cars.


My Mum had one of these. But not the fancy Ghia version with the twin headlamps: ours was the basic 1.6L.


.... and my Mum had the hatchback version of this.

 

.....


Our next-door neighbour had one of these - a Hillman Avenger. 50s and 60s cars had beautiful wood-and-metal dashboards. Cars from about 2000 on had nicely-sculpted, properly-designed plastic dashboards, with swoops and curves and careful ergonomics. But 70s and 80s designers of car interiors just didn't care.



Dad had one of these. It was great, apart from the rust. From the driver's seat, you could look through the windscreen and then through the rusted holes in the front wing to see the tyre*.

Ours was a bottom-of-the-range (or near as dammit) one, so there were features it didn't have, which meant there were blank buttons on the dashboard for things we didn't have - fog lamps or something. Dad claimed that one of these was a magic button that he could use to control the traffic lights and turn them green. We'd always ask him to press it, and he would say no, and then wait a bit and say he'd do it now, and press the button, and magically the lights would turn green. It was many years later that my sister and I realised that he was just looking at the lights for the traffic crossing us, and would press the magic button when he saw those lights change to red. I've tried this on my kids, but they're not as gullible as we were.


We test-drove one of these (although it was badged as an Opel Kadett rather than a Vauxhall Astra, because we were sophisticated Europhiles), in exactly the same colour scheme, with the same wheels, when I was about 9, on a cold, rainy night in Blackpool. I remember it really vividly, which is weird. I don't think it had crossed my mind in the past 30 years or so, until I saw this picture. I think it was the wheels that triggered me, but now I remember it like it was yesterday. I can even smell it. We didn't buy it.


*STOP AUTOCORRECTING MY CORRECT SPELLING, AMERICAN IMPERIALIST PIG AUTOCORRECT DEVICE!!!!!!!!