Holiday (December) car spotting

[trinacriabob]

We have a lot of distractions this time of year, but we are still seeing cars.  Seen anything interesting on the road?

Tonight I saw a last-gen LaCrosse in black coming up beside me on the freeway.  Black is not my color for a car, but, on this LaCrosse, it really amped up the grille, the chrome moulding around the windows and on the handles, and mostly the rear taillamp assembly with the boomerang shaped lamps, which looks sharp to begin with.

[Robert Hall]

Saw a really clean early '80s Buick Electra Park Avenue at the grocery... white w/ a dark red top and dark red interior.. always liked the styling of those cars.  Looked so classy parked amidst the boring modern generic transportation units...

[trinacriabob]

In retro mode - a month late - I gotta post in my own thread.

It was pouring Pontiacs!

It's always when you're driving along and, down some road or in some parking lot, you see something and come around to take a look.

Spotted in mid-December

Pontiac Parisienne - 1985 or 1986

This roofline worked and this was the nicest of the B-O-P+C in this category.  Even the skirts in the rear wheel well work with this car.  Hard pass on those skinny tires and wheels.

Nice rear fascia and simple, clean taillamps 

Slightly busy front end and too similar to its Caprice first cousin

The fuel injection badge indicates this has a Chevy designed (but corporate GM) 4.3 TBI V6 unless the engine was swapped out.  The exhaust being unchanged tells me it could still be this durable V6 residing under the hood.

Pontiac Grand Prix - 1973

While this is not my favorite GP of the '73-'77 body style, this may have been the best tail lamp treatment.  No 350 V8 of any kind under the hood ... yet.

Spotted the day before Christmas

Pontiac Grand Prix - 1976

What a foreboding car!  That has seen better days.  You can see my car behind it, with the door open.  I jumped out and took some photos.  

Overall, this was probably my favorite Grand Prix of the '73-'77 body style.  This probably had the Pontiac 350 V8 under the hood and this was the first year for the small block 350 in this car.

Things on Pontiacs need to remain horizontal, so this tail treatment was better than in '77, which had the worst ... and the worst front fascia, too.  This was probably a silver/burgundy body-landau top combination, something you wouldn't see much past the '80s.

The interior is in way better shape.  Crank windows!  It was air conditioned.  What a dashboard!  This was obviously the base model.  LJ was the way to go.

- - - - -

If this thing had been kept up, this would have been quite the car show showpiece.  And had it been an LJ, preferably with buckets and a console, with Pontiac rally wheels ,it would have been even better.

[trinacriabob]

I also saw an '80s Monte Carlo coupe that was being worked on.

It's hard to tell which specific year it was.  It was pretty torn up inside.  This model definitely leapfrogged the first downsized MC of '78, and they had to do very little to it to make that happen.