In the movie Inception, the protagonists at one point are involved in a shoout and car chase within a dream. As they race through the pouring rain, evading their pursuers, the same 1982-87 Chrysler New Yorker continually appears. I kept noticing the stretched K-Car and how out of place it seemed.
I had watched Inception the night I took these two terrible photographs in Brisbane. It felt almost surreal to see this pickup conversion of a 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, being used by maintenance workers on the busway no less! Was I dreaming? Was someone manipulating my subconscious as I slept?
As it turns out, I was very much awake. Still, it was such a bizarre sighting considering Cadillacs were not sold in Australia in the 1970s and these pickup conversions were rare. Sadly, it was a nightmare trying to take a good picture!
What is the most unexpected car you have seen in the most unexpected place?
Went to this junkyard full of forgotten treasures… I haven’t seen in YEARS.
I went with a few friends, to get parts for my 83 E70 Corolla’s motor swap from a 79 SR-5 with a 2TC.
So many rarities, I want to write a CC article just showing this junkyard and its inhabitants.
I was very amazed to find, this running and complete, C3 Greenwood Corvette.
Write it up! We’d love to see it. Junkyard articles are always fascinating, if a bit sad.
A Soviet built ZIL limousine-the one that has a front clip similair to a `61 Cadillac at a gas station-repair shop in Bensonhurst Brooklyn about six years ago.
Visiting from Brighton Beach, perhaps?
A poultry farmer in a brand new black Porsche 911, circa 20 years ago. He had a lot of chickens. The younger ones.
Oh, and while I’ve not yet seen it, my father’s business partner apparently owns a left-hand-drive Mazda R360 kei car. Even the existence of the car is kind of eyebrow-raising.
The two strangest were:
In West Virginia, in some horrible town where we saw inside some houses, more like shacks, with dirt floors, about 1986, and I saw a brand new Ferrari Testarossa, bright red, of course. It had a couple in their 30’s in it who seemed to be familiar with the area, and we all wondered “Who around here could afford it?”.
The other was just creepy. Also in WV, but later that night. We were basically lost in the mountains, trying to find a road and there were no signs, apparently that’s common in WV. There was this guy in a white K5 Blazer that kept popping up, over and over again. Always smoking a cigarette that lit up his face in orange every time he took a drag on it. Every time we thought he was gone for good, he would appear again. For well over an hour, he kept appearing, in front, behind, from one side road or another. My mother and her best friend were freaking out. When we finally found someone who told us where to get onto the road we were looking for, we assummed he was finally gone, but 20 minutes down the road, he passed us going the other way. I kind of wish I could have asked him WTF was going on, but I just wanted out of WV.
Wow, that’s freaky.
That Testarossa probably didn’t even belong to that couple. It probably belonged to a city slicker who got stuck in the wrong area of some backwoods ass community, and was killed, and his car taken by some, trailer park, derelict inbreds.
The scary part is the couple you saw were the most normal looking ones. They catch you off guard, invite you for some drinks, then you are followed by the jucket in the eerie K5 Blazer… Then they’ll try and box you in and rob you, or worse.
Kinda like that movie Wrong Turn. You were wise to leave WV.
That area has nothing of interest for me. Screw that.
Having gone to college with a couple of people from WV–my guess is that was the plaything of a coal-company executive or his progeny, or, a young couple down from Pittsburgh, which isn’t that far from northern WV.
An Austin Allegro in Manhattan 1980.
Here is an August 2015 photo from Portland, OR of a 1988 Nova from Illinois. Amazing to see this car so far from home and in such good shape.
Jay Leno pulled up to The Rock Store, a biker hangout on Mulholland Drive in the Santa Monica mountains, in a Duesenberg several years ago.
This TVR Sagaris was in Castle Coombe when I was there in 2009. It was rainy and gloomy and this thing was parked in the street. Of course, there’s a racetrack just up the road.
I found a Seat Ibiza on West 57th Street and Broadway a few years ago. And a 1973 Triumph Stag by the navy yard.
A parking garage in Bethesda, MD, late 1970’s. Parked in with all the yuppie cars… an Elva Courier. Still the only one I’ve ever seen outside a race track.
Back about 1985 I encountered a Bristol on the Virginia Beach Expressway. I think it was a 411, a little tattered, with a thirtyish blonde woman driving it.
I’ve seen four JDM vehicles that were never available in North America, RHD and all, in central/southeastern Virginia. First three were an R33 Skyline on highway 168 near the North Carolina border, a different R33 Skyline in Virginia Beach, and an A31 Nissan Cefiro AWD in my neighborhood in Richmond. The Cefiro was especially unexpected, as I didn’t even know what it was without reading the badges.
Then I learned there is a business in Richmond that specializes in importing JDM vehicles, and it stopped being so unexpected. So when I saw the R32 Skyline 4-door, it was still very cool, but not so unexpected anymore.
One of those R33 Skylines could have been Doug DeMuro from Jalopnik, since he got his GTR from an importer in Virginia.
Is DeMuro’s an R33? I thought it was an R32 (read the article where he took it to a dealership for service just to see what would happen).
If it is an R33 and I’m misremembering, it could have been the first one that I saw on 168. Dark-colored GT-R. The one in Virginia beach was white and didn’t appear to be a GT-R.
Not really all that unexpected, I suppose, it being parked in front of a bank and all….
..on the street in Greenwich, NY….
My oddest sighting was in Lisbon Portugal in 1982. We were walking through the Barrio Alta which is a poor neighborhood, and found a new Volvo 240 station wagon with New Jersey license parked in an alley. While a newish Volvo in a working poor area could be local kid made good and visiting, the US spec lights and US plates were a puzzlement.
I’ve also seen some unusual expedition vehicles but Oregon gets a lot of tourists so they make sense. Examples include a Swiss Landrover 110 with a Westfalia style pop top in Sisters, an MAN cabover class C motorhome at Bonneville Dam and a home made expedition camper on a Magirus Deutz 4×4 in Bend.
Nothing really surprises me in California any more, whether a true CC, an exotic, or a 6×6 expedition van with German plates. Though the Trabant that pulled up next to me in heavy traffic recently definitely made me stare. Probably the most out of place elsewhere, was a new-looking crew-cab 4wd Ford pickup, high end spec (Eddie Bauer or King Ranch), in heavy rush hour traffic in downtown Taipei. Definitely not a work truck, and taking up about as much space as 20 scooters, with driver only on board and nothing in the bed.
This also goes under the category of “nothing surprises me in California anymore”, I guess, but inching home in LA traffic one afternoon through Echo Park, I saw a somewhat dilapidated Citroen DS inching the other way. Echo Park has been gentrifying in recent years, but still…
I guess I’d have to add to that the Facel II (I think; I know it was a Facel) parked in Sierra Madre one Saturday afternoon–I’d only ever seen one in a book. But Sierra Madre has its share of wealthy hobbyists.
Never noticed this was in a driveway, only a lil over a mile, from where I live, and I drive this route every time I go to the library…
An Austin Mini Cooper.
Whilst holidaying in Europe two years ago, we arrived in Lausanne (Switzerland) via train. We stepped off, stepped out of the Lausanne station, looked left and there was this Seville! It was there for the 3 days we were in Lausanne, and was obviously used and cherished, but seemed so out of place in the narrow streets.
In the summer of 1988, I went to France for two weeks with my high school. I kept track of all the American cars I saw. I think there were around a dozen. IIRC, a Seville from this generation was one of them. I think I still have a journal I kept on that trip somewhere; I should find it and see if I can make up a list. The strangest one that I remember, in terms, of “why on earth would anyone go to the trouble to bring one of those over here?”, was an X-body FWD early ’80s Buick Skylark.
Chrysler Turbine Car going the other way on a Detroit expressway in 1965. Of course, I guess that really wasn’t an odd place to spot one, but I sure was surprised to see it.
Only 55 ever made, 46 destroyed by Chrysler. Only 9 kept… With 6 of them, the engines were deactivated and donated to museums.
Only 3 went to private collections… One owned by Jay Leno.
Although, they were never sold to the public… You may have seen a test mule or one of the remaining 3. Lucky you.
Not sure but at least I knew what it was. It sure had an interesting sound. . When visiting my brother in law in Michigan I saw a guy out driving a pre production XLR complete with the usual car cover type cladding. He was driving it in snowy weather on a secondary highway and seemed to have a lead foot. We didn’t know what it was, of course but thought it looked like a Corvette with vertical taillights.
I have seen a right hand drive English black taxi parked on the street in a small town in East Tennessee.
My second runner up is the fact that I have seen not one but two Lamborgini LM002 4x4s in person.
#1 was a red Lm002 that I saw in the late 1980s in NJ coastal town at a flower shop- not usual and not expected- in the pre-Hummer days it really did look freak show compared to other cars and trucks; I later read that one had been owned by Malcom Forbes (who had an estate in NJ), I was a teen ager and didn’t wait around for the owner to exit the shop.
#2 was a silver one in mid-2008 near the Chicago suburb of Northbrook IL at a suburban industrial park, parked in front of a speed and performance business, This one I was able to verity by the vin # against the online LM002 registry as having been a former show vehicle, The paint was a little in need, the round sealed beam headlights really, really were dated looking, and it had lost its panache versus the now larger Hummers. I took a video of it but that was on my work black berry which I later had to give back when laid off in late 2009.
I parked next to a Dodge Attitude with Tamaulipas plates at the Wal Mart in West Monroe, LA yesterday. Very unusual.
Is that the oddball Dodge-Hyundai rebadge job?