1963 Mercury Meteor Custom

After one year as a full-size, 1962 saw the Meteor nameplate moved to a midsize offering, becoming Mercury's counterpart to the new Ford Fairlane.

In '63, the car came in three levels of trim. Available as the base Meteor, the sporty performance-oriented Meteor S-33 hardtop coupe, or the deluxe Meteor Custom, Mercury advertised the car as having "Spirit, Sparkle and Brawn... Bright words that mean Mercury Meteor for 1963."

The bodywork had been lightly restyled so the pod-like taillights downplayed the increasingly unfashionable tailfins, and the advertising materials played up the modern stainless steel trim on the rocker panels of the Custom.

The base powerplant in the Custom was the Meteor 6, which was FoMoCo's 170 cubic inch OHV inline six advertised at 101 SAE gross horsepower. Optionally, a Meteor Custom buyer could spring for the 221cid V-8 rated at 145 horsepower or the Mercury Lightning V-8, which was a 2-barrel Ford 260 Windsor small block that put out 160 horses.

All engines could be had with the 3-speed manual or 2-speed Merc-O-Matic transmission and the 221 V-8 could additionally be optioned with a 3-speed manual that had an automatic 4th overdrive gear.

Alas, the midsize Meteor would be discontinued after two years of sluggish sales and Mercury would do without a car in that size slot until 1966, when the Comet got upsized from the Ford Falcon platform to that of the Fairlane.

The one in the picture, a '63 Meteor Custom sedan in Cascade Blue with a Pacific Blue roof, was photographed in May of 2013 with a Samsung Galaxy SII.

 

1972 Dodge Dart Custom

The fourth generation of Dodge's Dart filled the compact niche for the automaker. It came in two wheelbase lengths: The 108" fastback Dart Sport & Demon coupes, and the longer 111" length which could be had as both a coupe or a sedan.

The Dart Custom sedan, like this Light Gold and Dark Green Metallic two-tone 1972 model, was as plush as a Dart could get (which admittedly wasn't very plush.)

The base motor for a '72 Custom was the 198 cubic inch Slant-Six, a de-stroked 225 which had a 1-barrel carburetor and was rated at 100 SAE net horsepower. Next up was the famed 225 Slant-Six itself, which made 110 horsepower. While it wasn't a big horsepower jump over the 198, the 225 also made 185 lb-ft of torque to the smaller motor's 160.

The top engine offering in the plushest Dart was the Mopar LA 318 V-8, which had a Carter 2-barrel carburetor & single exhaust pipe and put out 150 SAE net horses. All three motors could be had with a three-on-the-tree manual or a three-speed Torqueflite automatic transmission.

The swankiest Dart would set you back $2,574 in 1972 dollars before you started checking option boxes, which comes out to a bit less than twenty grand in today's money.

This one was photographed in June of 2017 using a Leica D-Lux 3.

1964 Oldsmobile F-85

Olds threw in the towel on the "senior compact" concept after a few years of slow sales and, for the 1964 model year, the F-85 was bumped up in size to be a new "intermediate" or "midsize" car on the body-on-frame A-body platform shared with the Chevy Chevelle, Buick Special, and Pontiac Tempest.

Not having a suitable small economy engine of their own, the base engine in the F-85 models was Buick's cast iron overhead valve 225cid 90-degree V-6 with a single 1-barrel Rochester carb. Derived from the alloy Buick 215 V-8, the 225 was marketed as the Econ-O-Way V-6 by Olds and put out 155 SAE gross horsepower.

The V-8 fender badges on this Wedgewood Mist 1964 F-85 sedan tell us it has one of two 330 cubic inch Oldmobile V-8s: Either the 2-barrel Jetfire Rocket rated at 210 horsepower, or the high compression 4-barrel Cutlass V-8 which made 260 horsepower and sported a 10.25:1 compression ratio that required premium fuel.

 These photos were taken with a Samsung Galaxy SII in July of 2014.

1962 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner Convertible

A nice-looking Baffin Blue 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner ragtop turning southbound on to College Avenue from 54th Street. The '62 was the third model year of the second generation Galaxie.

For 1962, Ford had introduced the "XL" package for the Galaxie to compete with the "SS" versions of the Chevy Impala. If this had that option package, the rear fender badges would read "Galaxie 500XL" instead of "Sunliner".

The front fender badges proclaim the presence of a 390 cubic inch "FE" big block under the hood.

The 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission shift lever on the steering column means that this is the 9.6:1 single four-barrel version of the 390, which was rated at 300 SAE gross bhp. The more potent high-compression 375bhp version was only available with a manual gearbox.

Check out the dashboard, this thing's got a power top!

This one was photographed using a Nikon D800 and 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom lens in May of 2023.

1995 Buick Century

At first I thought I'd seen this particular '94-'96 Buick Century running around the 'hood before, but no. That one, seen below, was Dark Cherry Metallic with faux wire wheel hubcaps and this one's Ruby Red Metallic with what look to be steel sport wheels. Looking at both cars, the front passenger door rub strip appears to be a known failure point for this model.

The Century, platform mate to snoozers like the Chevy Celebrity and Pontiac 6000, was supposed to have been discontinued in 1990, replaced by the rebooted Regal, which rode on the same new aerodynamic front wheel drive GM W-platform as the Lumina, Cutlass, and Grand Prix.

The Century still sold like gangbusters though, especially to rental fleets, and the tooling on the old A-body cars was long amortized, so they and their Olds Cutlass Ciera cousins soldiered on with only a minor facelift.

In my headcanon, some young designer got tapped to design the snout of a "potential future Buick sedan with retro cues" and so he penned a shape with a bit of an aggressive undercut reminiscent of 5- and 6-series BMWs combined with flush aero headlamps and a graceful grille that showed a trace of that classic Buick waterfall look...

And then, to his horror, management took that attractive snout and slapped it on the front end of the '91 Centuries, to "freshen them up".

From the leading edge of the hood on back, the rest of the car is the same dull, boxy, angular Century it had been since 1982. Powerplant choices for '95 consisted of the LN2 2.2L multiport injected four cylinder rated at 130hp or the optional 160hp L82 3.1L SFI V-6. Both motors were backed with either a three-speed automatic or a four-speed automatic with electronically controlled overdrive.

This other Century had what looked like a two-letter badge on the rear fender back by the taillight. I couldn't exactly make it out, but it looked like a round letter and a squiggly letter. Did that dude put "GS" badges on his boxmobile? I opened it in Photoshop and blew it up before I realized that he'd just lost the "NTURY" off the right rear fender nameplate.

The top photo was shot with a Nikon D7100 and 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom lens in October of 2023, while the bottom one was taken in August of 2021, using a Hasselblad Lunar and Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* E 16-70mm f/4 OSS zoom lens.

2004 Rolls-Royce Phantom

After a bunch of drama that's hard to sort out even if you were following it in the motoring press of the time (which I was), Volkswagen AG wound up with the old Rolls manufacturing plant in Crewe, but without the Rolls-Royce name, which wound up licensed to BMW.

The first BMW-designed Roller was the Phantom (aka the Phantom VII) super luxury sedan, released to the public in 2003 as an '04 model.

Largely constructed of aluminum... sorry, "aluminium" ...with pieces sourced from Scandinavia and Germany before final assembly at the Rolls-Royce facility in Goodwood, West Sussex, the Phantom rides on a 140.6" wheelbase and tips the scales at a bit over 5,600 pounds. Power is provided by a longitudinal BMW V-12 located under that bonnet roughly the length of the HMS Ark Royal. Displacing  6.75L and sporting an 11.0:1 compression ratio, the 48V DOHC twelve routes 453 SAE net horsepower to the rear wheels via a ZF six-speed slushbox. 

If your chauffeur has a leaden loafer, this land yacht is supposed to get to sixty in a tick or two under the six second mark and will waft down the motorway at speeds up to 130mph. But nobody buys a $300 grand parlour-on-wheels to go racing, anyway.

The upper two photos were taken in April of 2024 using a Nikon D700 and a 28-200mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens, while the lower one was snapped with a Fuji X-T2 and XF 16-80mm f/4 R WR OIS zoom lens in July of the same year. 

1991 Oldsmobile Silhouette

Chrysler's minivan, derived from the K-car platform, arguably played a bigger role than any other factor in pulling the Detroit automaker back from the brink. In fact, the Voyager/Caravan gave Mopar an automotive niche entirely to itself as GM and Ford scrambled to respond.

The first responses weren't stellar, either. The Astro and Aerostar were based on Chevy and Ford's compact pickup truck chassis, respectively, and while that arguably made them better vans, it didn't exactly make them competitive minivans. Their body-on-frame design and truck DNA made them drive like small trucks and gave them rooflines some ten inches loftier than the unibody Chryslers, with correspondingly higher floors.

So GM went to a clean sheet of paper for their next attempt at a car-type minivan. The U-body minivans were sold as Chevys, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles and while they used styling (and, in the case of the Lumina APV, even the name) that echoed their respective branding's midsize cars, they were not actually car-based.

The U-body's unibody was a space frame clad in plastic body panels, similar to the method of construction used for the Pontiac Fiero. Drivetrains were sourced from the corporate parts bin. For the first model year, all three used the LG6 3.1L V-6, an enlarged version of the earlier 2.8L 60 degree V-6, fitted with a throttle body fuel injection setup and rated at 120 SAE net horsepower. Given how sluggish performance was with this setup, it's probably a good thing GM chose to eschew four-cylinder power altogether.

The Olds Silhouette was the swankiest of the three GM offerings. A '91 model, like the Gunmetal Gray offering in the photo, would have started off at $18,195, or more than forty-two grand in 2024 money, even before you started checking option boxes.

It was photographed in September of 2016 using an Apple iPhone 6s.

1999 Bentley Arnage Green Label

The Arnage and its Rolls-Royce sibling, the Silver Seraph, were the first all-new cars from the Vickers establishment in decades. As part of their updated image, they had their ancient pushrod motors replaced with 4.4L BMW V-8 powerplants.

These DOHC 32V mills were more efficient and powerful, especially the Cosworth-massaged twin-turbocharged variant in the Bentley, which thumped out 349 horsepower and 420 lb-ft of torque. The German magazine Auto Motor und Sport got a '98 Arnage to 100km/h in 7.3 seconds and to a top speed of 149mph.

Alas, the Green Labels are rare because Vickers was in the process of having its car brands carved off by the German automakers BMW and Volkswagen. BMW got Rolls-Royce while VW got Bentley, and it simply would not do to have a Volkswagen subsidiary buying motors from their rival in Bavaria, so the Red Label Arnage was launched with a refreshed 6.75L pushrod twin-turbo L-series V-8.

The one in the photos, which I think is in Dark Sapphire Pearl, was photographed with a Leica D-Lux 3 in February of 2017.

1982 Mercedes-Benz 380SL

Probably the low-water mark for the North American import Mercedes-Benz SL-class, performance-wise at least, was the '81-'85 380SL.

It replaced the 4.5L V-8 of the earlier 450SL with a 3.8L SOHC V-8 that was rated at 155 SAE net bhp in U.S. trim, a haircut of 25 horsepower from the preceding model. The '79 Oil Crisis had left a bad taste in the public's mouth for "gas guzzlers". Further, the federally-mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for imported marques rose from 19.0 miles per gallon for the 1979 model year to 27.5 for the '85s.

MotorWeek tested an '83 380SL, similar enough to the Signal Red example in the photo, and got an 18.5 second quarter of the $42,000 high roller droptop. That's $133,000 in today's dough.

It all seemed pretty par for the course in the early Eighties, which was the peak of "Decal & Ground Effects" performance packages that added very little real performance. You can see how people watching cars get slower and dumber year after year would write books like The Probability Broach. We had no idea how close we were to the Performance Renaissance.

This one was photographed in March of 2023 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.