100 Hana Highway
Maybe Maui Woowie makes people paint buildings purple and yellow, I don’t know. But the cars parked outside this small commercial strip are decidedly conventional. I’ll let the Commentariat identify the rolling stock.
CC Streetscape: Paia, Maui, 1983
– Posted on October 10, 2013
Nice picture. For some reason an Olds Cutlass Supreme doesn’t come to mind when I think of Hawaii. At least it’s white for all the sunshine.
Me and Mrs DougD were on Maui a couple of years ago. Best place ever.
Nice 510, what’s the green thing? These days it’s all rental Jeeps and Mustang convertibles but I did manage a shot of a Toyota Corona while there..
The green thing is a Fiat 131 station wagon, which is the one really unusual car in the lineup.
I never knew the 131 came as a wagon until recently. I really like it! At first glance I thought it was a Peugeot 504 wagon.
+1
Two out of the four are Datsuns and two out of the four are from brands no longer sold here (I don’t count today’s Fiat 500, because it’s marketed as a novelty and not part of a comprehensive range).
I wonder if one could conclude that this picture speaks to Datsun’s early success in the US market, relative to their status today as an also-ran.
Japanese cars made disproportionate inroads in the Hawaiian market very early on, due to a large Japanese-American population, among other reasons.
Well plus it’s easier to drive directly to Hawaii from Japan than it is the US. Or at least my first grader thinks so.
Datsun (sic) is an also-ran in the US market? I must have missed that news item.
What, a Fiat 131 (called Mirafiori in the US) station wagon?
When we were on Maui in 1978 we rented a dark blue Corolla with a tan interior and automatic. On the morning when we went up the Haleakala volcano we found that we were in a Toyota parade, with more than half of the other cars being rentals identical to ours except for paint color. The last time we were in Hawaii – the Big Island that time – there was a great deal more variety in the rental cars we saw. I looked in the phone book and found that there were more listings for car rentals than car dealers.
On my first trip there in 1977, Hertz gave me a Chevette, a surprisingly good car for the third world road known as the Hana Highway. Many of the privately owned cars are ex-rentals. Folks in the midwest complain about rust. You should have seen how Japanese cars dissolved in the Hawaiian climate, but from the top down. Another rental I had on a different trip was a Pontiac Sunbird. The outside door handle actually separated from the sheet metal due to rust.
When we lived on the Big Island, we had a Jeep shipped over from the mainland, rather than buy something locally.
Sadly, the music shop is now a lame real estate office.
Odd never expected to see a Fiat there. My guess the Fiat would have to had to come from a military family. Or Not I guess.
It is so cool to see this shot. I know exactly where this is. My first time in Hawaii, back in 1993, I saw a 1959 black Edsel, just a few blocks down from this exact location. I took pictures of it, replete with the Hawaii “Rainbow” license plates. However, since this was the pre-digital age, the shots aren’t easily available, residing in a shoebox somewhere in my attic.
That’s quite the attractive Fiat wagon, haven’t seen one of those in many ages.