Time for more B-body love. Here’s what may well be the nicest remaining 1987-90 9C1 Caprice on the planet, which I ran across at the same show where I spotted the ’56 Lincoln Premiere. Although it’s not nearly as amazing as the Lincoln, this Caprice caught my eye.
This car is pristine. There were no visible dents, scrapes or dings anywhere, and the black paint looked like you could fall into it. I’m guessing the owner collects police vehicles and went all-out to restore this one. Nice work!
Reminds me of my ’87 Caprice wagon–next to my current Subaru, probably the best car I’ve had, overall. I did have the blue velour-ish upholstery, and carpet, though. (Rubber flooring might have been better for the snow and slush of Wisconsin than the carpet we had, which was largely trashed early every winter and never really got clean.)
These cars have two of the things I miss the most in ALL modern autos:
1. Column shifter. Why are these considered unfashionable? I love the thunk of one of these falling home to D, and besides, that middle seat is valuable girlfriend space.
2. Crotch A/C vent. Sure, knee bolsters are important safety equipment yada yada blah blah. I LIVE IN HOUSTON WHY CAN’T I GET A PROPER CROTCH VENT?
I miss the crotch vent too.
My ’01 Seville has a crotch vent. Nice in the summer.
I also miss column shifters–it looked cool enough in my ’72 Skylark coupe in high school whenever I dropped it into drive and melted the rear tires on the way out of the parking lot. Try that in a ’91 Camry, console-mounted shifter and all!
I agree on the column shifter for a large sedan–not sure of the utility of the console shifter for a more or less basic car, unless there’s a transmission functionality reason.
As for the “crotch vent”, I believe the proper GM name was “lap cooler”. 😛 “Crotch vent” just sounds vulgar.
Yeah, I kinda wonder now if it was a safety issue that did in the column shifter…otherwise why did they disappear from nearly all trucks, too?
Or does the requirement for all seats to have a shoulder belt eliminate the bench seat, which in turn leaves a void that an interior designer might as well put a console in? Eh, beats me.
The console shifter is probably the first thing I look at in every used car interior photo, because it’s where every crumb and drop of every thing the driver ate and drank has landed and remained unvacuumed for decades. I much prefer unlimited arm/shoulder room and an armrest that looks like the side of a couch…
Column shifters are still around on “work truck spec” pickups at least. The space between the seats is usually taken up with a swing down armrest/storage compartment, and there is a seatbelt for the middle “seat”.
I don’t know about your girlfriend, but if my wife had to sit there for long the evening could well end in disappointment.
Nicely done here, oldmechanic guy!
🙂
Ford still offers a column shifter in the F-150, even in a Lariat. You can get a pretty nicely optioned GM truck to with the column shifter, although the top line LTZ models have a completely different dashboard which I don’t understand at all.
I have one in my XLT, but it is kind of clunky, I think that’s why you don’t see them as much anymore. And to be honest I’ve only ever used that 6th seat once, but I do use the extra floor space all the time. And a lot of new cars are so narrow you can’t use that space for a seat anyway and adding a shoulder belt can be a bit of a challenge for designers.
I also had a ’60 Chevy with the “3 in the tree” manual. That was pretty awful. Kinda fun for the novelty, but generally just awful.
Those column shift mechanisms have to be quite complicated and expensive to make. The only reason they ever took off was to allow a 3rd person to sit in the front seat. Before 1939 or 40, it was pretty much all floor shifts. On anything rwd a floor shift is such a simple, direct linkage. The fwd stuff is more complicated, so perhaps whether the shifter is column or floor makes less difference. There should not be any reason why automatics are not done by electronic pushbuttons these days, anyway, because the complicated mechanical linkage is an anachronism. Even throttles are doing away with them.
The column shift is still available in the Ford Police Interceptor (Taurus) and the Charger has one too. Not sure if any civilian cars still have them off the top of my head.
I always liked a good column shifter with a solid feel. Some were terrible though, like many Ford column shifters from the 90’s (very sloppy). The Japanese never seemed to make a good column shifter either. I have driven a late model Crown Vic and they have an excellent column shift while the older ones from the 90’s, early 2000’s I found slopppy.
“Crotch Cooler” was best.
I live in Oklahoma and I definitely feel your need for the “crotch vent”.
I think a new invention does it one better, the AC seats. I had them in a rental Buick Lucerne when I was in San Antonio in August. Literally saved my butt… My only requirements for a new car that eventually replaces my Outback are better MPG and AC seats.
I want this in my next car as well. My own Outback has the heated seats (of limited utility in LA), as part of the “cold weather package”, but it’s the ventilation I need more than that. Especially on my long commute (yuck).
Have you experienced ventilated seats available on new cars these days?
Fantastico!!
After my mom bought an Lincoln MKZ with air conditioned seats, both my wife and myself bought one, partially due to the air conditioned seats. I would not even entertain purchasing a car without them at this point.
I do miss column shifters. My T-bird is the only car I have with one, and it even has bucket seats and a center console!
Lerooooooooooooooy! (brillant) 🙂
Well, I’m in the opposite hemisphere to most of y’all, but column shifters don’t rock my world at all. My former Mitsubishi L400 was column-shift auto, and I’ve also driven a Mitsi L300 and XF Ford Falcon with column-shift manual gearbox. Column shifters just feel cheap and clunky to me; and they got in the way of the radio/aircon etc. Each to their own I guess!
Looks like it got an interior upgrade. Fabric seats in a police car would quickly become a bio-hazard. All the ex-RCMP units we had at the Rent-A-Wreck franchise I pulled wrenches for had the hose-out interior. Ours were 10 years older than this one though.
These things were surprisingly fast, and had the suspension to back it up. They were excellent police vehicles, but bad rental cars. Providing fast cars to the demographic we marketed to didn’t work out well at all. We sold the survivors to a taxi company somewhere after one of our customers went into the armed robbery business using our car to pose as a police officer. Then he outran a new Crown Vic cruiser before he was eventually caught. For 15 years after that every time I got into a cab at the Vancouver airport I wondered if I was riding in one of those cars.
I never saw one this nice even new!
That’s a very nice car. My guess on the interior is that it is specced for a more senior officer, and was used to cart around the superintendent to crime scenes and what not. That would also explain the condition, as such a car wouldn’t see much hard duty, spending most of its time in the cozy police garage while its allocated person was at his desk yelling at renegade cops and taking their guns and badge for the hoolabaloo they got up to, and thinking of how he would explain the mess to the mob of reporters outside.
The thing is, most squad cars were ‘pool’ cars, driven almost constantly, while those at the top had a car allocated for their sole use. It may have only been slightly nicer in spec than the squad cars, but the less frequent use meant it always looked more important.
The CHP used car lot on my way to work has scads of ex-cruisers and a few apparent supervisor Crown Vics (may have been CHP officials, or given the way California works, maybe even other state dignitaries who rated a state-supplied car)–I’m sorely tempted to go take a look before they get snapped up. No idea what the top brass are driving these days. Tahoes maybe?
Are you talking about that lot in Canoga Park?
Afraid they all smell like puke inside…
Isn’t this technically a 9C3 Detectives Special? Nicer interior gives it away.
By the way, police car names are some of the coolest car names ever:
9C1
Police Interceptor
Patrol Pursuit Vehicle
Etc.
I think it was cooler when you could find PI engines in non PI vehicles – special order…
I can recall old issues of HOT ROD when guys would be trying to decode VINs on junkyard cars to tell if it had “PI heads” or some other cop goodies they could steal. 😛
WOW, that car is incredible! Nobody pointed out the fact this beauty has an LT1 engine instead of the ho-hum regular 350 V8. I had an old 9C1 that had standard cloth front seat, but I think all 9C1’s came with a vinyl rear seat for easy “clean up”.
You could SEO one or the other from what I recall from the order books, all cloth, cloth front, vinyl rear, all vinyl.
Beat me to it! I wonder what other 94-96 Caprice goodies are on this car as well? 4 wheel disc brakes? ABS? Easy enough to do as the frames are almost identical.
You know looking at this car I wonder if it really started out as a 9C1/9C3? The only cop car parts are the rubber mat and dog dishes.Were’s the spots?The optional gauges hanging under the dash? Is that a cop car speedo? I’m thinking the owner wanted to recreate a 50-60’s style muscle car or sleeper. Remember when carpet was an option?Bench seats were standard. Real motorheads never spent money on fancy factory wheels because you always bought some Radars,Keystone or Cragar wheels after you bought the plates and paid the taxes. I once built my version of this car. It started out as a “What If?” concept. As in what if you could order a bare bones,striped down,plain Jane car with the the powerfullist motor available. So I took an 82 Regal coupe I had liberated from an old fart who couldn’t drive anymore. It started out pretty basic from the factory. For the interior I installed a rubber mat from a Malibu 9C1, deleted the factory AC with a factory heater only box.Added a factory radio delete plate. Added an all vinyl straight bench and rear seat from another Malibu 9C1. I wanted to use a T56 with floor shift but couldn’t find a cheap clutch bellhousing for the motor I was using so it stayed a column shifted auto. For the motor I wanted to keep it all Buick so I bought a salvage yard Land Rover 4.2, added a Thor intake with vintage “Offy” valve covers and some other goodies to give it a technically modern engine.Some 17″ wheels and HD suspension bits made it a terror on in the corners and the race track. I had it running and all it needed was some shiney paint to make it pretty but by than W and BO were tag teaming my finances pretty hard and I sold it to stay afloat a little longer. I’m guessing the retard I sold it to has it either sitting beside the double wide or has managed to get a SBC in it to use as a DD.
Its got a police spec speedo, I can see the numbers going up to 125mph or so, these usually had the add-on gauges next to the lighter on the dash, I cant see them from angle of the pic.
I wish my Impala’s dashboard switches, vent surrounds and door switches, stalk and interior trim were chrome.
I miss the days of beautiful, well-appointed interiors.
What I liked about this generation Caprice was that although the dash wasn’t necessarily the fanciest, it did wear well–it looked about the same the day I traded it as when i got it. (And I had the upgraded gauge package, with a round speedo, which was nice.)
I spent many hours staring at the dashboards of 80s B-bodys (from Pontiac, to Buick, to Oldsmobile, to Chevrolet) in all levels of trim. Fake wood, more fake wood, OMG did they put fake wood on the radio nobs? As long as the car had most of the optional gauges and not just the long speedometer/fuel gauge/temp combo I was pretty happy.
Although I always noticed when I got into one my Dad had been driving the balance and fade nobs on the stereo had been set up as if the car only had speakers in the rear just like it was his teenage years all over again. (I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker…)
For ’85, the Caprices all had silver trim, but went back to fake wood later to please traditional buyers.
I said I hated show cars in another post but I can’t lie — I love this thing. Aside from the nice interior it looks to be packing an LT1 under the hood. Wrong but so right at the same time. I bet this sucker will fly. Kudos to the owner for keeping the stock stereo
I really like this car. So understated but also so clean. The perfect sleeper.
Thank god it doesn’t have dubs. The police wheels look far, far better.
Amen, brother.
I don’t have a personal or even parental history with conventional Detroit iron but CC somehow is extracting any latent or suppressed attraction I do have, and these B bodies definitely trigger something. On the subject of shifters, I rented a FWD Impala this summer, with floor shift of course – but the PRNDL indicators were only on the dash. Having indicators in both locations is convenient, but having them different was just one example of the poor user interface on an otherwise quite pleasant car (with fuel economy beyond any B body’s wildest dreams).
Beautiful car. Looking at this car and the wonderful 66 Impala submitted by Daniel and you can follow the evolution of the 4 door full size Chevy. Just a logical progression of sorts. I long for the day when the current melted-candy bar on a sidewalk styling comes to an end and the squared off look returns.
Very, very nice car. This was my all time favourite Caprice, 1989-90 Caprice 9C1 with the TBI 350. Easily the fastest police car of it’s era and the fastest boxy Caprice. This onewould be a rocket with the LT1 upgrade. It’d be quicker than a 94-96 if it still has the stock 3.42 gears and it weights less.
I always wanted to find a 9C1 from this era in mint shape and have it as my daily driver. Tough and reliable, comfortable, looks great, great handling, acceptable gas mileage and I can do all the repairs/service myself. I never did find one and they are next to impossible to find now. The civilian cars with the stock soft suspension were too soft and no fun (for my tastes). The F-41 option was decent but you’re still stuck with a 305.
There is nothing like a big RWD American car that has decent power, brakes and handling. I still prefer the way one of these 9C1 Caprices drives over many better performing modern FWD cars.
There is nothing like a big RWD American car that has decent power, brakes and handling.
Amen, Brother…
What the Blues Brothers would be driving if the movie was made today and I had anything to say about it.
There’s something about the composite headlights on those 1987-1990 Caprices that erases the ’80s look of the quad-light models, and replaces it with timeless badassness.
Predicting the pictured car will fetch a pretty penny at auction in 10-20 years…
If somehow the 1991-96 Caprices kept a boxy look, without the bulgy whale fenders, they may have lasted longer.