Another new 911 Targa yesterday! My 4th in the wild. While I’m stopped at a stop light in Palo Alto CA yesterday, one crossed the intersection directly in front of me. And then at that same intersection and not 10 seconds later a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta immediately to my left and going the same direction as I was, he got his green left turn arrow and I gawked as he drove away with the V-12 snarling nicely.
The new 911 targa goes for maybe about $150,000, nicely equipped. The Ferrari F12 Berlinetta? Maybe $375,000, nicely equipped. Palo Alto is a rough neighborhood.
The new 911 targas aren’t for everyone but I really like them. Here are my posts for every one that I’ve ever seen, they’ve all been reported in this thread:
Last week, I spotted a Dodge Stealth AND a Mitsubishi 3000GT out in the wild on the same day. They weren’t the turbo R/T or VR4 versions but were pretty uncommon around here when new twenty years ago and scarce today.
Not exactly a car, but a tiny house on a trailer being pulled by a pickup. I wonder if it was intended to stay on the trailer and move around from place to place or if it was just on there for transportation.
Took a drive up to Solana Beach for lunch today, and in addition to the usual array of Boxsters and M3s that prowl the beachside neighborhoods, i saw a Mercedes AMG GT, a Lamborghini Aventador, and a bright yellow Porsche Carrera GT.
I finally tracked down a vehicle I’ve seen a bit recently. It’s a MV-1 built by AM General, and I’ve seen them in taxi guise and used as mobility vehicles for transportation companies. Took me a while to track it down.
By “interesting” I mean it started a conversation.
“What the hell is that?”
“Why do they call that a Jaguar?”
“It looks like a Dodge Challenger!”
“Why is it black? What happened to British Racing Green?”
“Where’s the hood ornament?”
“What did they do to the front end?” (Followed two seconds later by) “What did they do to the rear end?”
“WTF were they thinking?”
A generic dark gray Honda Odyssey minivan, except that it had hot pink hubcaps and was driven by a middle-aged Asian woman with pink hair. I was so busy staring at it that I nearly missed my turn arrow.
Not a car, but the first tractor trailer I’ve seen with LED headlights. Didn’t figure out what manufacturer made it (or whether it was an aftermarket modification), though.
That one’s easy. Safety regulations. The nose of cars now has to be smoothly rounded with no protuberances for a pedestrian to be hooked on, but rather let him/her smoothly roll over the bonnet and windscreen and drop back onto the road to be run over by a passing lorry.
A Maserati GranTurismo convertible(!). Thosecarsarebeautiful! (various web images) They’ve apparently been out since 2007, but I don’t recall ever seeing one before.
They really are lovely cars. I prefer the hard top coupe myself. But what I really love is the exhaust noise when you give it the beans. Angry motherfuckers.
Have not seen one in person yet but there’s a dealer a couple of miles away so I’m going to pay a visit this weekend to see if it’s in their showroom. Perhaps a test drive.
