I saw this car just a couple weeks ago, while sitting at a red light. If it looks familiar, that’s because it was covered on these digital pages back in 2012: Car Show Classic: 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Landau. Good to see it still in fine shape–I didn’t even notice the sign at the time.
Digital hat tip to Jana Lingo, who did the first Sign Says It All post here: Wordless Outtake: The Sign Says It All.
A GM “greatest hit”.
Actually, a home run. The creased rear window glass must be expensive.
it looked way better inverted like the 1969 Impala SC –
They were expensive, but the 1977-78 Toronado XS had an even more extreme ‘hot wire bent’ rear window. In comparison the Chevy’s rear window looks a little tame. Though there are many more Chevys with a HWB rear windows.
Perhaps the best looking of the ’77 – ’79 B body coupes. The window frames painted the top color on the Landau cars was a nice touch.
nice car, I always thought the downsized coupes looked best in the 1977-79 design.
great design. I like the 80 up coupes too. I’m sure the younger types find it hard to imagine that full size two doors were once amongst the biggest sellers, growing up in this age where only minicars have two doors.
My favourite for the 77-90 B-bodies. I’ll take mine with a LM1 350, F41 suspension, and no vinyl top or velour seats.
+1
Learned to drive in a ’86 blue with “wood” Classic wagon. I loved the way it just floated down the freeway. Every weekend, when I had to go from Elkhart to South Bend, I took 80-90 just so I could float at high speed. I suppose I was lucky to never get a ticket.
Absolutely beautiful! I remember when these came out thinking they were the best looking GM cars in years and such an improvement on the previous design.. They still look good today
What has always puzzled me is how could anyone at GM think the replacement Bloatmobile was an improvement. Maybe it was the same committee that blessed us with the Aztec.
Even with the flaws of the original design, it’s still a historically significant car. What flaws? The THM-200 trans, guaranteed to grenade before 20,000 miles. The vaporizing cam lobes. The weak paint, the flimsy seat cloths and headliners. The design was so good that these can be excused to some degree, and the engine trans issues only affected 305 cars.
We had a 77 Caprice with a 350 4 barrel with an rear anti-roll bar. The catalytic converter had been replaced with a test pipe before we got it. When you punched it, it sounded like a cop car and would go well on the highway. The transmission always whined when it shifted, but still worked when we got rid of it after about 150k miles when the frame broke from rust. My dad fixed it, but was ready to move on so he bought a Corsica. The Caprice was a great car on the highway, as it cruised effortlessly and quietly. The car rarely broke down. I agree that they had headliner problems and ours had to be re-glued. The velor seats were comfortable and it looked sharp. The cams had a defect, because they were too soft. GM paid to have ours replaced. The paint always looked good and it didn’t seem to rust while enduring the salt of the rust belt. I wish my dad still had it as it had style and wouldn’t look like the cookie cutout cars of today. It also had that cool v8 sound.
The THM-200 gets a bad rap. Was it a particularly good trans? No. But it did have some good units. The family ’79 Malibu had a THM200 behind its 267 V8, and it ended up needing a rebuild…at about 130K miles and 14 years old. I’ll take that service life without complaint!
Some cars just look right from every angle. This one does.
This car is a good example of ‘they got it right the first time’. The more formal roofed 2-door caprices are a huge step backwards, and the wire spoke wheelcovers with white wall tires do this car no favors. The white over candy red paint scheme does NOT bring out its best features, either. Still, a clean example of the car and a nice find!
speaking of Caprice rear windows. Here is the suprise underneath the ’86-’90 Caprice Classic Brougham LS landau vinyl roof. Regular Caprice sedans were sent out to ASC (Amercian Sunroof Corp.) to do this window treatment to give the car its more formal roofline.
Ick. The formal roof Crown Vics and Grand Marquis from the Eighties were just as Rube Goldberg-ed.
I remember when Chevy “Cadillac-ed up” the Caprice to create the Caprice Classic Brougham, these must have been a goldmine for dealers, I remember that they moved the seat controls to the doors too, like on a Cadillac, and added what used to be the Oldsmobile 98 seats to the Caprice to create the Brougham, it was all out of the parts bins, so it must have been a good money maker.
Now this is more than your Caprice, it’s even more than your Caprice Classic, heck, it even more than your Caprice Classic Brougham, this is your Caprice Classic Brougham LS, oh yeah, your darn tootin!
That’s real luxury there, you betcha!
How very odd. Never knew that was all done with a specially shaped window!
Do you have the vinyl shell Caprice 1988 only the shell
My father, and later I, had a 1979 Caprice Classic with the same rear window. It also had cluster gauges.
I agree, GM’s Greatest Hit.
But, CAFE and Truck mania killed them off.
Nice car. Most of the early versions had Turbo 350 transmissions, and those were overall very reliable cars. Didn’t see many with the Turbo 200, and as the earlier poster pointed out they were only used with the smaller engines. Once in a while you would see a bare-bones 1977 model with the 250 straight six. Chevy did have some issues with ‘soft’ improperly heat treated camshafts around 1979 (I changed a few) but that was about it. It was a good excuse to install a slightly more aggressive cam without retarded timing!
I read once the cma problem was caused by faster opening contour to the lobes, wiith less overlap and opening dwell degrees, thus making a more pointy lobe that would get knocked off.
Certainly could have been a factor as well. The ‘soft’ cam story was going around then, and I don’t think many that were replaced out of warranty were replaced with stock camshafts. So, if the cam profiles were the actual cause, an aftermarket cam would have been a permanent fix. And all of the cams I replaced lasted the life of the engine! I did see a similar problem on a few Ford trucks around the same time.
Almost forgot in my earlier replies–the lady who lived next door to me while I was in my last year of college and first couple working years (2002-2004) had a Caprice Classic coupe, I think ’78 or ’79. No vinyl roof, so it wasn’t a Landau, but it did of course have the fabulous bent glass backlight. Silver over a red interior and in pretty impressive shape for a 25 year old car. She didn’t drive it often–she had a ’90 or ’91 Accord DX coupe for daily duties–but it had current registration and occasionally got driven. She was an older lady, so I wonder if perhaps it might have been a late husband’s car, or if maybe she liked it so much she kept it around after getting the Honda.
I regret never asking her about the car’s story, or even perhaps making her an offer on it, as even then the coupes were pretty rare and I quite liked it. After moving I still drove by frequently, and sometime in 2006 the Caprice wasn’t there anymore, though the Honda remained. I can only hope it went to a good home.