The carriage of Archduke Rudolf on the day of his assassination. (Was he actually in that when he was shot?)
Crown Victorias and cops?
How about the Rimac Concept One? Most people who know the car know it as the car that Richard Hammond crashed.
When vehicle discussions inevitably shift to the classic 4-horse chariot, is not Gaius Appuleius Diocles the first name to pop into your mind?
Ayrton Senna/F1 = meh
Richard Petty/NASCAR = meh
Appuleius Diocles/Charioteer = rock star
Franz Ferdinand was riding in a motorcar, which was supposedly cursed:
However, I don’t think this counts as the make of the car isn’t well know except to historians of the event.
I was looking for quirky used cars and someone mentioned an Aston-Martin, and I could NOT picture an ordinary car. My mind immediately conjured up a silver coupe with tire-shredding hub caps, oil slick/machine gun tailpipes, rotating license plates, and an ejector seat.
The AMC Pacer
A car famous for being quirky.
There is only one acceptable color for the Fokker Dr.I.
Actually, a yellow Ryder truck seems exactly what the OP is looking for. After OKC any sighting of a yellow Ryder truck would bring the bombing to mind, whereas I don’t recall ever seeing a white Bronco and thinking, “OJ”.
This will be a real downer with the name vehicle association:
Christa McAuliffe - Challenger Disaster
In my mind I associate pink Cadillac convertibles with Jayne Mansfield, but that wasn’t the car she was killed in. It is fairly obscure.
1966 Buick Electra 225
There was even a film nominally (well, stretching quite a bit) about that car.
I can think of lots of celebs that died or had other notable events in cars. But can’t really name them at all. So outside the OP’s example, it’s pretty much a blank for me.
It’s true though. I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the other shuttles*, but I’ll never forget that one.
As a measure of overall recognition though, I don’t think it rivals the white bronco.
- Including the one I walked through at a local museum. “Discovery” perhaps?
This thread got me to wondering where the Bronco is now.
Turns out both it and Bundy’s VW are at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Tennessee.
While the OP eliminated the DeLorean because of the Back to the Future franchise, I will nominate it anyway - the second thing I think of when I see a DeLorean was John DeLorean’s cocaine bust while trying to raise money to save the company. That’s a real life person and event, so it qualifies. And it was big news at the time, there were postersand everything.
That’s the baddest model Fokker of them all!
“Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile has killed more people than my guns” is a fairly well known phrase.
The 1952 Cadillac that Hank Williams died in has some legend to it.
Yup, same here.
While most people may not know the exact model, say “Man standing in front of tank” or even “Chinese Tank” and pretty much everyone will tell you the famous man standing in front of a group of Type 59 tanks in Tienanmen Square in 1989. It’s the only other vehicle besides the White Bronco I can remember people referencing constantly in popular media in regards to a certain incident it was affiliated with.
Sometime later I read that in the quarter following the crimes, white Ford Broncho sales increased by a third.
I thought that was an interesting sociological observation. I never saw that anybody made anything of it, though.