Cars you may have spotted in May

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In the first few days of the month, I went to get some strawberries on the cheap and saw this in the parking lot ...

... early '90s Ford Tempo coupe in "LL Bean / Eddie Bauer colors" that were popular for cars in that decade

... plastic manual window cranks ... it was nighttime.  

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Spotted on Cinco de Mayo.  This Sedan de Ville had less than 100,000 miles on it. And, being a 1977, this car is 45 years old! While I appreciate the car, it's not something I'd want.  I didn't even crank the key to hear what the engine might sound like.  Almost all of the boulevardiers from this era tend to lose the quiet exhaust notes of when they were new(er), which is too bad.

The downsizing from 1976 helped this model, but maybe less so for some of the other full-sizes like those by Pontiac

This car sure has a balanced profile.  I like how they raised up the rear wheel well without putting a skirt on it.  It could have used a piece of chrome on the B-pillar. 

Looking over these sorts of lines and through a hood ornament is a thing of the past.

The padded vinyl roofs looked great on almost all GM full-sizes of this era, and some mid-sizes as well.

Fairly nice looking dashboard with a protruding center stack and a cowl ridge at the top of it.  Circular gauges would have been nice, but that time hadn't yet arrived.

This is a view of the interior of the cabin.  Cadillac seemed to have ditched some of the really gaudy cloth interior choices from years before to go with simpler mono-color ones like you see here. Cadillac always paid attention to their interior lighting, like the one you see on the rear sail panel.

This is some generous legroom in the rear of the cabin.

Bottom line:  what a majestic vehicle.

[trinacriabob]

Spotted two days ago, VW's Passat has come a long way and is now a fairly substantial car ...

Spotted yesterday around the Houston Galleria, I also saw another Porsche (Panamera 4 door, maybe) in this exact same new color (a lot of enamel paint jobs on expensive cars lately) some 5 minutes earlier ...

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Within an hour in the Post Oak-Galleria area and the River Oaks section of Houston ...

Crown Victoria and Grand Marquis have big Texas written all over them, seen here at one of the entrances to River Oaks, possibly the nicest neighborhood in H-town.

TEXAS and TRUCK both have 5 letters; love the palm trees in H-town that you don't get in the "Big D."

Here's a REAL classic!

And, as a bonus question, why the heck is my car parked next to the Greyhound station? (This one has the nicer alloys.)

[trinacriabob]

Seen along Westheimer (yes, Westheimer) just inside the Inner Loop en route to the Galleria. 

The license plate frame says "NXCESS."  That might be a different way of saying "Poverty Sucks."

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More "Texas Excess" - limos where their owners don't seem to worry too much about gas prices ...

A stretched Escalade seen in the "Bay Area," which is south of town, about halfway to Galveston, and close to the NASA complex.

A stretched Chrysler 300 seen at the '70s looking Bush Intercontinental (could that be intergalactic) Airport (IAH), the main airport.