We pick up this story after I had gotten rid of the Pontiac Acadian. I had decided to use my ’70 Chevy pickup for the summer, and the start of university, but the engine in the truck wasn’t up to the strain of daily use. My big idea was to find a suitable engine in a vehicle just good enough to drive for the fall and winter.
Back to the buy and sell paper I went. After some searching, a ’83 Monte Carlo in a seedy part of town was found. Inspected for 9 months, 4 good tires, no holes in the body, and a healthy 305 under the hood. $500 exchanged hands, and I was good to go. The car had the typical problems for the type, all too familiar to those who owned these – bad upper ball joints, easily fixed, worn door pins and bushings making the doors drag on the striker pins, and a broken frame in back, patched up with some tar, and bolts through the trunk.
The twin to mine, if mine was in much better shape. Via findclassicars.com
This car seemed to have a flaw that showed up the first week I had it. I was pulled over by the RCMP, I’d had my high beams on. This was during the day. The officer was pleasant enough, he checked my info and let me go. I’d thought it was odd. Two days later, I was pulled over again, and the officer said I was speeding. I hadn’t been – and they let me go again.
Near as I could figure, the guy I bought the car from or a car like it was well known to the police, and they were checking it out. I’d never been pulled over before, and haven’t been pulled over to this day. After talking it over with my father, we decided to get the car resprayed. Some mis-ordered paint from one of the auto parts stores in town was obtained, and the car was cheaply painted.
The only picture of the car I could find. It’s a yard of Curbside Classics!
With the orange and black paint job, the 19-year old me thought it was quite sharp. It had gotten the nickname General Lee for the obvious reasons. Looking back, it was a silly colour, but what can you do? The car proved to be the most reliable car I’d had yet – never once giving an ounce of trouble, and even completing a trip to Chatham, New Brunswick, to visit a close friend in college there. It was about a 1300 KM round trip in an old, cheap car, and it didn’t miss a trick.
I liked the car so much I swore I’d have another one some day, and I eventually did – in spirit, if not in form. The winter had passed, and the time came to take the engine out of the car, and put it in the truck. It was a perfect truck engine – Lots of low-end torque, but not much on the upper end of the rev range. The car was sent off to the scrap yard. The frame and floor pans were pretty rough, and the car wasn’t worth saving. I never missed getting pulled over by the Mounties, though. Did any of you have a car that seemed to attract law enforcement?
In college during the 70s, a more prosperous friend had a red Porsche 914. He somehow obtained a personalized Missouri tag reading “HAHA 55”. That tag made promises the rather anemic 1.7 engine was wholly incapable of delivering. One thing the combination did deliver was plenty of police attention. It wasn’t unusual for a police car to roll up behind the Porsche at a stop light and pull it over for an ID and vehicle safety check as soon as the light turned. Even “back in the day”, this was not a car you wanted to drive out to a bar in the evening.
1994 Red Golf GTi. I have my only 2 speeding tickets in that car. It might, just might be also that it was my first decent car after graduating college and I was in my twenties..
’78 Chrysler Cordoba. It was a bit ratty looking with loud dual exhaust the previous owner added.
This was in the mid nineties in a nice town that my parents had bought a house in.
It was constant, I swear. Car too loud, you look suspicious, you were speeding, etc. Aside from being a bit loud, it was all bored law enforcement I swear. Had quite an entertaining conversation about dual exhaust when pulled over once. Scrapped shortly after I graduated HS, have never again had that happen.
1989 Kawasaki Vulcan 88. Actually it wasn’t the bike, but the patch (Brotherhood of Veterans M/C) on my back. Shortly before my father died, knowing I’d be talking over the family home (in the rich part of town) I’d gone ahead and had my driver’s license and registrations (the bike and my 91 Dakota) addresses changed. Smart move.
As soon as I crossed the line from the city into thre suburbs I’d see the flashing red lights. The usual stuff, “flickering tail light”, “loud exhaust” (bone stock – there were no aftermarket exhausts available for the Vulcan at the time). Within a month, I’d met the entire seven man borough police force.
As course, as soon as they saw the address on the paperwork, suddenly there was no problem (don’t these guys talk to each other?), and if anything there were quite decent afterwards to deal with. Up to an including the point on a couple of occasions when they saw to it I got home safely when I should have been in jail for a very clear DUI.
At which point you run into the conundrum: Do I get offended over profiling, or appreciative that they were doing such a good job looking out for me as a property owner? Then there was the time I had the entire club up to the house for the housewarming cookout . . . .
It’s a fun feeling know you can singlehandedly kill property values.
Unless you look like someone the cops want to harass they won’t stop you for noise violations. That includes very loud Harley Davidsons, with the right complected riders and vehicles with license plates obscured illegally with plastic. They consider that type of work as beneath their pay grades.
Never got a ticket, but was pulled over at least a half-dozen times in my ‘71 VW van for a variety of barely-credible reasons.
Certainly wasn’t for speeding!
I was pulled over once in my first Falcon because it “matched the description of a car that was seen hooning around that industrial estate”. Whether or not that was my car proved to be irrelevant because the cop that talked to me just immediately thought he had the wrong guy, while the cop talking to my passenger ended up grilling him about his life.
I figured, “Hey, I don’t look like the kind of guy who gets up to no good on the roads”. This was confirmed when I was pulled over in my Calais because it matched the description of a stolen vehicle in the area. The two cops came, the older male cop said, “We had reports of car thefts in the area but… you don’t look like a car thief” I acted faux offended and his offsider started laughing.
So I guess the moral of the story is, I drive cars that thieves and hoons like (well, I do tend to drive Falcons and Commodores) but I don’t look like a thief or a hoon.
If I was less scrupulous, I’d use this cloak of innocence for evil. But I’m good…
My 1st car was a 68 Mercury Cyclone GT (fastback) that seemed to garner a lot of attention but I have to say it was really me.
That car was medium yellow, so “hiding” in traffic was really not an option.
Another car that seemed to be a police magnet was a bright orange Vega panel express. That car almost seemed to be like a red flag to a bull.
When you tend towards cars driven by suburban parents or elderly people the law leaves you alone.
I have been half expecting some attention of this sort with a red Miata, but no.
I have owned and driven a half dozen Mustangs through the years and never got stopped while driving one of them. I suspect this was because I was at least nominally a responsible adult by the time I got the first one and, as others have noticed, if you look like an upstanding citizen the police are not likely to bother you. Quite a contrast from my teenage years when I was driving older, well used, cars; then I would get stopped for “driving while young” on a frequent basis. After a while it got to be humorous, I would be out at night, either coming home from work or from band practice, and then the flashing lights would magically appear. If nothing else I became “friends” with all of the police officers in my small hometown.
I owned a “Daytona Blue” 2007 350Z with those bright chromed wheels that I received 4 speeding tickets in one year in. The only reason I didn’t get a 5th was by turning on what little charm I had to convince a female John Candy lookalike California CHP officer I should get a non-displayed front license plate ticket instead. The serial letters I received from the DMV were a hoot, gradually went from very polite to just short of a threat of death by lethal injection.
The black ’96 Thunderbird I had generated a lot of attention in the late ’90s; or perhaps it was self-inflicted. There were a handful of four-way stops near my house that were there for traffic calming as there was no way they met any volume criteria for having them (they’ve since been removed).
Anyway, as one who has trouble generating any respect for stupid things, I did my slow-and-go too often and got to meet several representatives from the Cape Girardeau police department.
Car and Driver once did a review on a Chrysler K-car in which they claimed it was completely ignored by police, regardless of how fast they had been driving. I suspect that chances of avoiding being pulled over in innocuous vehicles like minivans and Priuses are similar.
With that said, pretextual traffic stops by cops for minor infractions like missing front plate, failure to signal lane change, failure to come to complete stop behind the white line, exceeding the speed limit by less than 5 mph, etc. are all the rage these days, not to mention the license plate readers which quickly scan and notify police if there’s a red flag for a particular vehicle. One of the most egregious recent examples was when a couple of white cops in Winfield, KS (70 miles north of Wichita) decided to pull a black guy over for failure to signal a lane change. The cop stated “what caught his attention” was some ‘vegetation” on the guy’s driver window. Without performing a test on the ‘vegetation’, the black guy was dragged out of his vehicle and he and his vehicle were searched. Nothing illegal was found.
A few years ago, there was the famous Sandra Bland incident in Prairie View, Texas where a white cop harassing drivers in a 20 mph zone raced up on her. When she moved over to get out of his way without signalling, he pulled her over. The cop was passive-aggressive with the black female from the Chicago area, intentionally escalating the situation (but still being perfectly legal) and she was ultimately dragged out of her vehicle, arrested, sat in jail over a weekend, and committed suicide.
The bottom line is, if a cop wants to pull you over, all they have to do is follow you and, eventually, they’ll find a reason, no matter how specious. The real problem is, courts constantly rule in favor of this kind of harassment with the rationale that the ends justify the means. Probably cause has deteriorated to the point of being nothing more than a cop’s hunch that a driver has done something illegal.
In my VW Golf an officer pulled me over and said “you yielded, but you really didn’t yield you know what I mean?”
I drive a `94 Saratoga (LeBaron sedan), a car you not often see here in Germany. Maybe this is the reason why I´m pulled over by the police twice this year.
When I was 19, I bought a (well used) 84 EXP. it was black with black tinted windows. I had never heard of a “tint law” until I got that thing- I got pulled over weekly until I peeled all the tinting off. It really was DARK-like, barely able to see out at night dark. I also got pulled over for no front plate, headlight/taillight out, “looking suspicious”, and “excessive show of power” (leaving an intersection too fast, apparently) Although anyone who drove one of these things could tell you, it definitely didn’t have an excess of anything, let alone power… Between all the negative attention I was getting, and it constantly blowing head gaskets, I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
Oh yeah, mine looked like the pic, but with more rust, and much darker windows. The wheels (both in the pic and the car I had) were the “Michelin TRX” wheels-a weird metric size that 4 tires would cost more than the car was worth… the car not being able to hold an alignment basically meant tires would wear to the cords in months, and I wasn’t gonna spend $1000+ (in 1990) for imported tires that would be bald in no time…
Between 2001 and 2005 my daily driver was a LT1 police package Caprice bought at auction complete with black steel wheels, spot light, illegal tint, and a cheap white respray. I got pulled over all the time for all manner of pretenses. Well….and a few that I deserved. The police really don’t like it when you look like them. I wasn’t trying to pretend I was anything, I guess I just watched the Blues Brothers too much as a kid.
One example of an undeserved incident was when I drove the car out to Los Angles from the Mississippi Gulf Coast….two thousand miles on I-10 each way. I got pulled over twice. Once by a Texas State Whatever who just wanted to check my trunk for drugs, and once by some kind of indian sheriff. I-10 must cut though the corner of a reservation somewhere in New Mexico, and they were using it as a speed trap. I was being passed by 18 wheelers going uphill in the middle of the night but somehow I was the one who got pulled over and ticketed for speeding. I tried to call about the ticket repeatedly but it always went to what sounded like someone’s home answering machine. I didn’t want to mail a check without talking to someone. My calls were never answered so I just didn’t pay it and never heard anything more on the matter.
Of course on the flip side I was let go several times when I certainly would not have been if I wasn’t a polite young white guy. The most egregious example of that took place on the several-mile-long bridge across Biloxi Bay. It was a fun place to get some speed up and I would occasionally race other cars. I once surprised a Mustang GT by hanging right by him up to 135mph when he backed off. Anyway I was going across one night when I was being followed closely by a W-body Impala that I thought was an SS. I accelerated up to 85 just to get him off my ass but he stayed right there until we got across the bridge and into his jurisdiction at which point the blue lights came on. Oops.
He got me out of the car and gave me the usual bullshit about “a car matching my description” and quickly two more patrol cars show up a crowd gathers. I thought I was about to be hauled off but they were more interested in the car. I popped the hood for them under the pretext of checking for illegal police lighting; they expressed some jealousy for the mighty LT1 over their weak-chested CVPI 4.6’s. Eventually they let me go with hardly even a warning, which was doubly amazing considering my insurance had lapsed. Ah, the folly of youth.
Well, not a specific car, but 40 years ago this summer (and also in the summer of 1977) I worked as a transporter for Hertz…we’re the people who return a one-way rental back to the home rental office. I was a college student, and we were called without notice when they wanted us to take a trip…I was living in New England, so the distances were usually fairly short but they would “chain” pickups in opposite directions so you might still be driving for long hours…like having to go to Albany NY on the way to Boston MA (our home location was the Airport in Burlington, VT).
Frequently we would go up to Montreal, which was actually the closest “big” city to Burlington, and of course would need to stop at the border. Of course I was a young guy driving a late model car….they would always want me to open the trunk of the car (which as a rental car was empty)…I’m sure I was being profiled as suspicious. On the other hand I wasn’t pulled over by police for that reason, and I don’t think it mattered too much which model car I was driving (though most of them tended to be Ford Thunderbirds, or LTDII, which was popular back then).
Many years later I did get pulled over about 15km after crossing the border from Hungary into Slovakia..we had stopped at the border but I guess we looked suspicious (I was driving with my sisters and parents in a Ford Sierra Station Wagon with Swiss plates)…my Dad was pissed at me as I had gotten pulled over earlier in the day for speeding, but this time that wasn’t the case…they made us drive back to the border and took another look at our passports and looked at our luggage, finally got bored, and let us go on our way.
Ha ha……funny you should ask if there were any cars that anyone has got pulled over in. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving my 2005 Mustang GT, and was pulled over by the cops. I wasn’t speeding or breaking any rules, and also had my seatbelt on. He had scanned my licence plate, and it turns out that I was driving an uninsured vehicle! I had forgot to renew my registration, as well as my licence (the first time in 21 years since I’ve been driving and an error that will not be happening again). He said, “there’s two types of people that drive these cars……nice guys, and criminals!”, which I thought was a tad overdramatic, but ultimately, his profiling did me a favor. If I had been in an accident, I would have been totally screwed.
He wrote me three tickets–$298 for driving without a licence (2 demerits), $298 for driving without registration (2 demerits), and $672 for driving without liability insurance (10 demerits). I went down next day to plead my case, and ended up only getting one ticket for $298.
Plus, I was ultimately lucky over the years that I’ve never been caught in the more flagrant of motor vehicle sins, such as excessive display of speed, ha ha.
The 78-79 montecarlo looks way better.
So basically you had the local equivalent of the Jesse Pinkman Monte Carlo. Good thing you resprayed it 🙂
The most speeding tickets I ever got was in my 1996 Mercury Sable Wagon when I was in college. Not exactly a fast or flashy car, I was pulled over seven times that year. I maintain to this day that the Philadelphia Police Department actively discriminates against drivers with NJ plates (lots of people commute from NJ to Philly, but there is a resentment in Philly for everything about NJ except for the shore). I simultaneously replaced the Sable with a much sportier car and became a PA resident, so the new car got PA plates. I didn’t get another ticket for many years, despite taking full advantage of the newer car’s greater performance.