How does this look to you? The '06 Chrysler Imperial.
The 300 isn’t bad, either. And that sold.
I know that VW made the Beetle down in Mexico until just a few years ago, and someone told me once that they also still made '57 Chevy Bellaires down that way as well. Could have been total BS, but you could make the older style cars in another country and import them to get around those safety regulations, right?
Chevy is coming out with a new Camaro. Unfortunately, I think they did a half assed job and could’ve made it look a lot more like a '67 Camaro a la 2006 Mustang (I think Ford did a great job on that design). In fact, I have a hard time identifying it as a Camaro.
Yeah, and it’s huge. Sharp, though.
Assholes like Ralph Nader and his ilk would never let them see the light of day. They would be so heavy and full of safety crap they would not perform and would cost so much no one would buy them.
Hell, the NTSB wants to put airbags on motorcycles (since they can’t seem to outlaw them outright)!
Oh man, I would do so much for that GTO in the OP.
Them sir, is fightin’ words.
There has never been, nor do I feel there will ever be, a car to rival the 1964-1971 Pontiac Gran Turismo Omologato and I will fight to the pain any who say different!
Yeah, I’d buy one if they built a replica. Gotta have squishy brakes and mediocre steering, tho.
Bah! I for one am sick of even the existing ‘retro’ cars out today, like the Beetle, Mini-Cooper, Thunderbird etc.
Old cars look old for a reason. Big chrome knobs, wide bulbous curves, doofy round headlights. Its like looking at pictures of some godawful kitchen from the sixties!
It’s entirely possible to build a car which looks identical to a classic, but has modern components, safety features, etc., but the car companies don’t want to do it. Why? Because it means they’d have to admit that they’re out of ideas. Let’s face it, US car companies are so out of it that they allowed the Japanese car makers to get the best of them again, for them to grasp that they could make a fortune selling modern classics is simply beyond their intellectual capacities.
Mind you, a person with enough money can get pretty close to what a modern classic would be like. Many companies make kits so you can add things like disc brakes, independent suspension, and the like to a classic. Heck, simply replacing some parts with duplicates made using modern materials can improve the performance of the car in terms of things like handling.
I like what Chrysler said about the new Challenger - it looks like the car you remember - not the car that the Challenger really used to be. If you actually go back and look at an old Challenger, there’s a lot wrong about it - it’s just that what was right was so good we forget about the wrong parts. For example, look at the hood overhang on the original car. It’s WAY out there. There all kinds of gaudy little chrome bits that look out of place. The wheels are sunk too deep in the wheel wells. What made it distinctly a Challenger is the roof line, the belt line on the car, and the long flat hood.
The new Challenger captures all the good stuff, while cleaning up the bad. The wheels are pushed out, the overhangs are smaller, the ugly chrome is gone, but it’s still undisputably a Challenger. It looks like what a Challenger might have looked like then had the designers had modern materials and CAD equipment to design with. I think it’s a splendid job of retro-design.
The new Camaro looks more like what a modern Camaro might have looked like had they not gone off in a different design direction in 1970. It’s got the lines of a 67-69 Camaro (especially the roof line), but it looks thoroughly modern. It’s not really retro, it’s more a re-envisioning of what Camaro might have been today had it gone the Mustang route and stayed truer to its original roots.
My worry with the Camaro design is that the chopped roof look doesn’t quite make it for me. It doesn’t look like visibility is very good, and it just makes the car look slightly too squat. If they had lifted the roof by another 2-3", it would have looked better IMO, and would probably have been more practical. But it still looks great.
I remember an article from probably 15 years ago that appeared in Car & Driver magazine about a company that was selling updated versions of classic cars. They would buy, for instance, a beater 66 Chevelle convertible, install a modern electronically controlled V8, disc brakes, steering with an updated suspension and tires. I forget the cars they were selling, certainly the aforementioned Chevelle, Impalas maybe, I don’t remember what else. So you end up with a car that is, from the outside, a “real” classic car, but it has modern running gear for reliability and such. The catch was that they were rather expensive, I’m guessing here, maybe $35K? And it would NOT be a classic to the people who might want to buy it from you so it wouldn’t be an investment.
I like that new Camaro, it’s sweet! I like the chopped look, makes it look swoopier, and the retro styling cues on the front grille are very nice–I liked the pic with the new one leading the older ones halfway down the page in the link. The rear view looks nice and mean with the dual exhaust, fortunately without the current trend of fat assedness that’s creeping into many GM models. The interior looks lux as hell, too. Those seats make my back sigh with longing… I wonder if Scott Settlemeier is still the program manager for Camaro, because that looks like the car he’d like to build.
I love the old cars, don’t get me wrong, but they had a lot of things wrong with them. If the designers of the time had the technology available today, those cars would never have been built, and that’s just plain sense. Sure, a COPO Camaro is fast as hell in a quarter mile, but try to take it around a corner without dying horribly! I’ve driven a lot of those old cars and as much fun as they can be I don’t trust them nearly as much as the newer models–suspension alone is about a billion times better in even a low end new car, not to mention braking systems and engine technology. Sound systems and soundproofing are lightyears improved as well.
I’m all for the current trend of taking retro styling cues and making distinctive, good looking vehicles that fully utilize all the good automotive engineering we’ve come up with in the last forty years. If nothing else, it’s freaking sweet to have a car that’ll do well over a hundred MPH all day long and still get decent gas mileage while not belching megatons of particulates and other pollutants out its ass. It’s very possible to take the best parts of the past (the LOOKS, more than anything else!) and marry them with the best parts of the present. I’m glad to see car makers taking a few more chances on styling that’s distinctive and edgier–generic box vehicles are for commuters who don’t care about looks. Me, I like a car that makes me smile every time I go out to the driveway.
Well, someone’s trying.
Yeah, but look at the front end. Totally different from the real thing.
That’s interesting, as is this: http://www.n2amotors.com/5to1.htm
However, the first one is $135,000. A little pricey. :dubious: