With the ’85 Volvo declared unroadworthy, I went seeking a replacement. I looked at a metallic sky blue $200 Reliant or Aries that had been hit hard in the left rear, a ’90 or ’91 Crown Victoria just to check if it seemed any better (it didn’t) than the Stinkoln Clown Car, and a 383-powered ’68 Chrysler priced too high—probably a good thing, or I might’ve bought it, and it was very much not the kind of car I needed.
I don’t know what possessed me to fixate on a Caprice. Maybe it was memories of the ’78 and the ’84 my folks had, but I got a bug to pick up a Caprice. I went looking at an ’86 semi-locally; it was in good shape with low miles, but I thought the price too high at $4,300 or so, and I was skittish about buying from a used car dealer, anyhow.
Surely the local used-car scene can’t have been all that barren, can it? Probably not, if I’d been more thoughtful about it and considered costs other than the purchase price. Once again, though, that uncommonly good experience with the remote purchase of dad’s ’62 Dodge drowned out all contrary experience and memory.
So I acted rationally: I went on eBay and bought a 1991 Caprice that had been retired an owner or two ago from the Scituate, Massachussetts cop shop. I think my winning bid was closely around $2,500, which was just right; I had a weird psychological thing where a good car was supposed to cost between about $2,500 and $3,000. The ’62 Lancer and ’65 D’Valiant had been right in that range, and I guess that’s what set the expectation—I still struggle with this expectation that a good car should cost less than they tend to.
I got a mileage ticket from Untied, and flew to Massachussetts with a duly registered Michigan plate in my briefcase (emission tests? Safety inspections? Pshaw, not in Michigan; what are you, some kinda communist?!).
The car was certainly used, but it seemed basically sound, intact, and as presented. The transmission was rebuilt by a non-SCAAMCO shop, the radiator was a new Modine, the intake manifold gaskets and valve stem seals were new. It had a new DieHard Gold battery, a factory-upgraded TBI 350 engine with heavy-duty everything and coolers for all fluids, factory silicone heater and radiator hoses, power locks and (uselessly tiny) sideview mirrors, extra-fast power windows, and heavy-duty seats in police-only dark blue. It had a cop motor, cop shocks, cop brakes, and it was a model made before the LT1, so it’d run good on regular gas.
It had GM’s “Package, vehicle anticorrosion, hot melt type”, and was substantially unrusted. It was my first car with ABS—a primitive, lame Bosch system. Digital speedometer (certified, but with no mph/kph switch) and full gauge package. Electric trunk release. More-or-less working factory air, a driver airbag, and that disagreeable split-rocker headlight switch GM were so madly in love with.
It was ugly from every angle, but it was an ex-police car. I ran fun mind-movies of putting half a dozen antennas on the roof, an A-pillar teardrop spotlight, a set of front push bumpers, a black hairdryer combined with one of those cigarette pack-sized radar detector setter-offer things, and I’d be all set for scare-to-order traffic gaps. Vehicle adornment could take the form of small letters “I am” and big reflective ones speling out “POLITE” down the side. Also, “Emergency dial 911” on the trunk—always good advice!—and a fleet vehicle number (oh, say…2327) in vinyl stencil numerals.
But first I had to get the car…er-ruh…not home exactly, at least not at first. I put the plate on the car and drove it, in as-bought condition, from Massachussetts to Toronto. That was an interesting 600-mile trip of nine-plus hours. For one thing, the car had flaws and faults and shortcomings. There was water in the left taillamp, so there was no point replacing the dead outer brake light bulb; it would only explode the next time I hit the brakes and the water splashed onto the hot bulb. The radio, what little there was of it, didn’t much work. The wipers weren’t much good. There was a disconcerting whiff of exhaust from time to time inside the car. And it ran as though its shoelaces were tied together; there wasn’t much moxie behind the V8 engine sounds. I could keep up with traffic, just about, but it took a lot of doing and frequent kickdowns and there wasn’t much pedal left.
And me, I was in faulty condition myself. I was headed to Toronto to declare myself in love. It was the first time I’d ever had occasion to say such a thing to anyone, I had no idea what he’d say, and I was a nervous mess—especially my gut; I had to stop at what seemed like every damn rest stop and service plaza on the whole route.
Eventually I made it to Toronto. Bill detected something was up (or off) and suggested we go for a ride in the new car. That was weird in itself, because he hated cars, and still does. Most of them are not built for the likes of him—a long-legged 6’4″ (193 cm)—and he saw a lot of seriously gruesome car crashes as a kid, and always lived where there was decent public transit. I drove us around, alternating between ear-splitting silence and contrived small talk, and we wound up down at the lake shore. There we spent an hour or so back and forth between freezing outside and warming up in the car. He was remarkably patient, especially after I said I had something to tell him but couldn’t bring myself to actually do it. What possibilities might’ve run through his head, eh! I have to tell you…that I’m an axe murderer.
By and by (and by…and…by…) I got sufficiently hungry and tired and fed up with freeze-thaw cycling to jump out the plane, wordwise. As I mentioned last week, it worked out well in the long run; we’re happily in year 21. It worked out well in the short run, too; we got back in the car, went back to his house, ate some food, and got some sleep.
Back in Michigan, one of my friends on the solar car team, a GM enthusiast, offered the use of his grudge to look into the car’s poor performance. We threw the usual list of tune-up parts at it: air filter, spark plugs and we might’ve done plug wires, cap and rotor, PCV valve, throttle body cleaner. The twin fuel injectors were spraying just fine; clearly the engine wasn’t starving for fuel. The ding moment came when we checked the timing and found it severely late, something like 10 degrees after TDC. With that fixed, the car seemed to have double or triple the scoot. Zero problem keeping up with traffic now!
Ding!
In between classes and Toronto round-trips, I set about fixing and improving the car. I used up most of a tube of Mopar RTV repairing the taillight leaks and the tears in the door seals, trunk seal, and heavy-duty rubber floor mats the car had instead of carpet. Many are the uses for rubber squeezed out from a tube, but I am not one of those who can apply and smooth perfect caulk beads; I’m an awfully messy pastewaster about it, at best. And speaking of best, it’s best I never try to use tub-and-tile or kitchen-bath caulk; any brands or variety of that material, dispensed from any kind of tube or tool in my hands, is guaranteed to get all over the walls, floors, ceilings, fixtures, and windows of the four nearest rooms, plus the actual workroom itself and every part of me. No, the only way for me is to use a very good grade of automotive RTV silicone. There are numerous brands and varieties of that, too, and most of them are right out of the question; there are only and exactly two kinds I’ve ever had any luck with. One is Chrysler’s. I have no idea who makes it for them with what recipes (it comes in three colours), but it is as easy for me to work with as the others are impossible. Good job I’m not jaded and cynical, or I might have to wonder if Chrysler supply a good RTV sealant because they also supply leaky vehicles. Maybe or not, but I have just about never succeeded in making anything but a horrendous mess with most other brands and grades, and the only other product I can use without causing caulkpocolypse is Valco Cincinnati’s aluminum stuff (and this stuff will carry on sealing the bath tub to the floor even when the washroom gets down to -80° or up to 600° F!).
Anyhow. Car repairs. Some stuff on the Caprice got fixed or improved. I replaced the long, black-painted, unbent-Z-shaped column gear lever with a short, curved, chrome one out of a ’70s Oldsmobile—ooh, sporty! I went back on eBay and bought a factory CD radio out of, I think, a late ’90s Camaro. Right size and shape, but the mount brackets didn’t quite line up, so I just relied on the faceplate to hold it in place, which it more or less did.
A quick bit of automotive history: one of the great many flaws in the new 1971 GM B-bodies was that the HVAC was poorly designed; it let outside air leak in past the heater core and A/C evaporator, rendering the system useless in hot or cold weather. This, according to DeLorean’s book (“On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors”) was discovered in plenty of time, but those who discovered and squawked about it were ordered to mind their place and sign off on the system: Shut up! We’re General Motors! They’ll take what we produce and they’ll like it! I mention this because the HVAC system in the new ’91 GM B-bodies had exactly the same problem: poor design allowing outside air to bypass the heater core and A/C evaporator. Maybe they eventually sorta fixed it, the way they eventually sorta fixed the ’71 system, but on my car I used up another tube of Mopar RTV gooping up unauthorised air passages so my toes and I wouldn’t freeze quite so much.
I take a dim view of throttle body “fuel injection” compared to real (port) injection, but rather than a carburetor I’ll certainly take TBI—especially a reasonably well-sorted system like GM’s. About the only running trouble I had with it after setting the timing was that it suddenly grew very cold-blooded, gasping and hesitating and behaving like a mid-’70s car until fully warmed up. Easy fix: the flexible stovepipe from the heat stove on the exhaust manifold to the air cleaner snorkel had fallen apart and disappeared. A three or four dollar replacement solved the problem completely.
There was an awful stench inside the car…sometimes. Seemed like it was coming from the HVAC ducts…sometimes. Smelt like a putrefying mouse or something…sometimes. So I got a bright idea to disinfect the ducts without taking everything all apart: I started the engine, put the blower on high, and stood at the cowl with a trigger spray bottle of bleach, which I sprayed into the air intake. Eight or nine sprays in, the engine began to roughen and hunt. At about spray № 12, the engine surged twice and died. It would crank, but showed no sign of life. Umwhut?
I don’t recall how the diagnostics played out, but eventually I found the car’s ECM was located, either by design or by deterioration, in the HVAC intake air path, and my clever work had caused terminal corrosion (in both senses). I removed the bleachy module, took it inside, and wrecked a bunch of pencil erasers by pushing them onto each terminal pin, one by one, to clean them up. I had no good way to clean the socket receptacles, so I just sprayed them with tuner cleaner and gooped them with Ox-Gard left over from the Volvo. When I put everything back together, the car started and ran, hoorah. But even before the bleachy smell dissipated, that putrid stink kept coming back…sometimes!
The temperature slider cable broke. I couldn’t get a replacement from GM—discontinued—but a wrecking yard a fair distance away had a ’92 and didn’t charge much for that part. I’d determined the cable in my car was broken by sticking my head under the dash, but I couldn’t get enough access that way to replace it. As I took the dashboard apart, I suddenly got a snootful of that awful stink. It was the backglass defogger switch socket, which was most of the way melted. Gobs and strings of plastic drooped down from it like gooey mozzarella on a fresh slice of pizza.
I was Schroedinger’s Caprice owner: simultaneously shocked and not-shocked that GM had chosen to run all the current for the backglass defogger through the switch, without a remote relay. I removed the melty, reeky remains of the plastic socket and pushed the individual terminals onto the switch pins, then wrapped them as well as I could with high-temperature electrical tape. The defogger carried on working, and the stink stopped.
If only my car had been a year older, it’d’ve had these…
Other stuff on the Caprice didn’t get fixed or improved. The headlamps, for example, which is a big ol’ laff because Daniel Stern. The bath tub Caprice’s headlamps were a giant downgrade from the ones on the last four years of the previous (box) Caprice. Those had large reflectors, separate ones for low and high beam, and 1,700-lumen high and 1,000-lumen low beam bulbs with efficient axial filaments and a low beam bulb shield to cut upward stray light—all behind a sturdy glass lens with optics engineered by one of North America’s best headlamp engineers, a real rock star in that field. These on the bath tub Caprice were the opposite of all that: a single small reflector with a single bulb containing sloppy, inefficient transverse filaments producing 700 lumens on low beam and 1,200 on high beam, no bulb shield, and a plastic lens with optics designed by a brand-new intern with no expertise. Completely legal, but completely awful. And that was just the lousiness built in by design; the ones on my car were old. The lenses weren’t much hazed, but the reflectors had begun to fail. The aim adjuster screws were stripped and broken, too, so one lamp pointed up in the sky—far above other drivers’ eyes, so I wasn’t such a glare monster—and the other lit up the bumper bar. In their rotten condition, these were just ideal for driving to, from, in, and around Ontario and Michigan in the winter; they did a great job illuminating all the snowflakes for me: yep, it’s snowing! On one awful drive back to Ann Arbor the snowflakes were all I could see; there was next to no light on even the snowbright road surface. I drifted back and forth across invisible lane lines; only when I would approach one or the other shoulder could I see a cue to correct back in the other direction. I’m surprised I didn’t get stopped as a suspected drunk. I never got around to replacing those headlamps, let alone upgrading them.
…but instead it had these. The “other reflector” in there is for the turn signal.
Nevertheless, it was a passably reliable barge in safer condition than the rusty Volvo to commute back and forth from Ann Arbor, where I was finishing school with a lot of absence, to Toronto where I was building the foundation of what would eventually become my marriage. In December-January 2000-’01 I had a few concerns regarding the alternator. Its bearings had begun making a slight bit of noise. Not much, just an occasional little “chip!” I could hear if I had the hood open and was paying attention. I gave the front bearing a little squirt of Tri-Flow, and that seemed to hush it. I was busy—oh yeah, coursework—so…out of earshot, out of mind.
Noisy bearings don’t fix themselves, though. The morning after a prolonged birthday weekend in Toronto, I hit the 401 to drag myself (kicking and screaming) back to Michigan. About 56 klicks southwest of Toronto, the smells of deep-grease-frying metal and insulation permeated the car, and a hair-raising grinding noise began—like a buzz saw chawing on tool steel…or a Ford power steering pump. So at first I thought the steering pump had locked up and lunched the new serpentine belt. The pump had been working okeh, but had been noisy on cold mornings. Or at least I thought it was the P/S pump making noise. But then it occurred to me that I still had steering assist and the engine temperature wasn’t climbing, so the steering and water pumps had to still be working. My next guess, still at highway speed, was that the alternator had locked up. Then it occurred to me that everything else was still turning and I wasn’t smelling burning rubber, but hot metal, so I guessed the alternator bearing had failed. As if to confirm my driver’s seat diagnosis, the “AMP” light came on, the voltmeter dropped, and the grinding noise grew more horrendous.
I took the next exit, found it devoid of any services, and so got back on the 401, still discharging. Went to the next exit a couple kilometres along, grinding and stinking, found an Esso station, parked, and raised the hood. The front half of the alternator was that nice cooked-metal colour. Absolutely spotless, too, in the manner and by the means of a self-cleaning oven, except for some flakes of ash that had been engine compartment grease. Also, a great deal of smoke was billowing up from the alternator. I went in the C-store, bought a litre of water, sprinted back out and poured it over the searing-hot alternator. The water behaved as though poured on a hot stove, flashing instantly into loud steam. It had the intended effect, though, cooling the internals down enough to make a fire less likely, though I think the C-store clerk wasn’t so confident on that. He pointed me to a Canadian Tire a block away, so I started the car and made a gonzo run for it. I’d guessed once I allowed the alternator to stop turning, it would weld itself solid. Yup, that happened. Goodbye, new serpentine belt; rubber smoke wafted in through the dash vents.
I told the Canadian Tire service writer I had a Caprice with a dead alternator and went across the parking lot to Swiss Chalet for supper. An hour or two later the car had an indifferently “remanufactured” unit at retail parts and labour prices, but the funny part was they gave me the core charge. I’m here to tell you, there was absolutely nothing salvageable on or in the alternator they removed. It might’ve made an acceptable doorstop or heavy-duty paperweight, but that’s all.
There was still the matter of occasional exhaust smells in the cabin. Some investigation under the car revealed a crack almost the whole length of the catalytic converter. “Test pipes” were a thing of the past, but this was Michigan, as I say, where there will likely never be any vehicle inspections (regarded as a sort of war-on-cars affront to the local industry), so I paged through the Walker exhaust parts cattledog, jotted down the critical dimensions of the direct-fit replacement converter, went to a local exhaust shop and told them I needed a short piece of pipe for a generator shed installation: so-and-so long, ball expansion and 2-bolt flange at one end, etc. The twenty-something dollar result found its way under the car, then once I disabled the air injection the exhaust stopped smelling like a furnace and reverted to a 1965 odour. The cracked catalytic converter turned out to be empty.
First gear in that 700R4 transmission didn’t sing, which bugged me, but one morning on my way from my apartment near North Campus down to the parkade I used near Central Campus, I thought I heard a sort of chattering or ratcheting sound in first. I pulled into the parkade and started up the spiral ramp. The chattering noise quickly grew louder, then something snapped and the car stopped moving. Six gear positions, no motion! (or: how I got a nonzero percentage of Ann Arbor’s car-commuting population very upset with me in one easy lesson).
Even once down the ramp again, it took a lot of manœuvring to get the car onto the tow truck in the confined spaces of the parkade’s entrance chutes. The “rebuilt” transmission’s front pump gerotors, normally a 2-piece set, had become something like a 37½-piece set. I called the shop in MA: too bad, so sad, we’ll be happy to take a look at it; when would you like to bring it in? Thanks heaps.
I called around to the wrecking yards, but nobody had a suitable used transmission; my guess is they were all hoarded by the taxi companies. So I got to buy a transmission rebuild for something like $1,400. Whee!
But there were fun times, too; Caprices were still recent enough at the time that people went out of their way to defer to my white-outside/blue-inside one in traffic, even though I hadn’t actually carried out any of those antennas-and-pushbars-and-lettering shenanigans. Nobody so much as blinked when I used the “AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY” turnaround to exempt myself from an awful traffic jam on the interstate one day. Eventually I sold it to a young man whose Asian-American family had only ever had practical small Japanese cars. Things got off to a bit of a rocky start for him (starter motor at the 1-week mark) but once that was replaced and his parents’ nerves calmed, he enjoyed the hell out of it; I saw him hooning around town from time to time.
I replaced the white whale with the very much better 1992 Chrysler LeBaron I bought from my mother, which meant she needed a new car. That provided some chuckles of its own, which I guess are substantial enough to warrant their own post.
All in all the Crapiece was what it was: a hard-worn running moneypit. It served its purpose, kinda, more or less, and it was relatively comfortable for Bill, but I’d rather it had been the very fully loaded, low-miles ’79 Caprice Classic I saw in Hemmings for $3,500 and missed by a day a few years later. Less forecastically, I’d’ve just about certainly done better for less with that local ’86 I’d turned up my nose at. Oh well, you know’t they say: live and…uh…what was the second thing? Oh well, maybe it would occur to me in time to pick the next car. Or not; tune in next week!
I forgot how weird those instrument clusters looked with the offset digital speedometer flanked by a host of analog gauges. Just. why?
I continue to be amazed at how many of your life details parallel my own in so many ways. You’re 2-3 years older than me, but your car purchasing and driving adventures are way too familiar. As mentioned in a previous post, I did purchase some lamps from you back in the early 2000’s… I certainly woulda guessed at the time that you were quite a few years older than I, as your lighting knowledge well eclipsed mine.
My 1991 Chevrolet experience was a GMT400 work truck belonging to an employer, and my own Lumina 3.1 sedan that I purchased from the original owners’ estate with 14k miles in 1997. The Lumina is still with me, for better or worse, running strong with just under 238 kilomiles; the body and interior are… rough. The Lumina’s HVAC system is phenomenal, though, and uses an electronic actuator to control temperature. Only big things it has needed were TCC solenoid in the 125C trans, and intake gaskets once.
Aw yeah. The curse of the CS130 alternator (though I thought the Capiche used a CS144). The Lumina’s first rectifrier signed off at 28k, then the rebuild lasted to around 85k before bearing noise set in. I tried to nurse it along with spray lube until my days off, but it did the same thing as yours and seized after a couple days. I was luckier than you, as the fan and pulley were salvageable on mine. I also understand that they can grenade when the rotor hits the stator, as my work truck had a series of dents poking outward in the hood from alternator shrapnel… workers that were there before me said that they quickly put out the resultant underhood fire with an extinguisher.
“I forgot how weird those instrument clusters looked with the offset digital speedometer flanked by a host of analog gauges. Just. why?”
Exactly my thought when I saw that. I actually laughed at it. What were they thinking? Clearly this had not come past any designer.
Thanks for a great article.
That there’s yer Mark of Excellence, is what that is!
That’s funny, I have the exact opposite feelings about the gauges. I saw that and was reminded that the 91-93 Caprice police package has probably my all time favorite gauges. Yes, it is not pretty, but it is extremely functional and is one of the best examples of automotive function over form.
This was a police only feature, regular models had an analog speedometer. The digital speedo was for cops to easily see at a glance precisely how fast they were going (accuracy confirmed by “certification”), all the better to know if the car they are tailing is speeding. They later put the digital speedo in all 94-96 Caprices, which I think they did so they could continue giving police package cars the digital without having the expense of two types of speedos, but it’s a bonus for anyone as the digital is so easy to read.
The 94-96 lost the tachometer, unfortunately. I also like how the 91-93 panel is so SPACIOUS: it has a full complement of gauges, they are large and spread out and there still is a bunch of extra space. I defy anyone to find a more functional design!
In addition to Mopar RTV, their Heat Riser Corrosion Rust Preventer is also great stuff to free up rusty fasteners.
It certainly is! 4318039[…AA, AB, AC, etc]. Don’t know what’s in it, but it smells completely different and works completely better than just about any other rust penetrant, with the possible exception in some circumstances of Kroil.
AC-Delco heat riser penetrant smells the same, works the same. Hard to find around here. God bless Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Genuine-GM-88862628-Penetrant-Inhibitor/dp/B00BK7MLKE
That super-retarded timing is a mystery – how would someone, especially someone who was paying for (or installing) name-brand replacement parts, not notice that?
This is a car that never lit my fire at all – maybe if I were to drive one it might change my mind – at least it would have decent power compared to those 1980s C bodies with 307s I spent way too many years in.
Ooooh, that 68 Chrysler 383 would have been so much more satisfying!!! Ask me how I know. 🙂
It did have decent power. The later LT1 motors had very much more power (and thus the same headlamps were even less excusable) but brought their own kinds of GM halfassery—such as the Opti-Fail (Opti-Spark) ignition: quick to break, expensive to fix.
That ’68 Chrysler would have been a colossal damnuisance in Michigan winters: it would need warming up if it had been sitting more than a couple hours, it would get single-digit gas mileage around town, it would need constant oil changes, it would have no defogger worth mentioning, etc.
“That ’68 Chrysler would have been a colossal damnuisance in Michigan winters: it would need warming up if it had been sitting more than a couple hours, it would get single-digit gas mileage around town, it would need constant oil changes, it would have no defogger worth mentioning.”
Oh, you kids! 🙂 I had plenty of V8 Mopars that would start right up and run properly from the get go in frigid weather, and they put out far better heat than the slant six would. And for the record, mine DID NOT get single digit gas mileage. It got 11 mpg, thankyouverymuch.
Just for clarification – we’re talk about miles per gallon, but does/did Canada use Imperial gallons or US gallons? Are we all thinking of the same units?
Canada used imperial gallons until January 1979, when fuel began selling by the litre.
I turned this many* old in January 1979.
*holds up three fingers
Retarding the ignition timing is a good way to hide rattling bigend bearings when selling a dubious old dunga, dont ask how I know.
I’ve heard the tales of the leaky A/C systems in the 70’s B-bodies before, but I must admit I don’t ever remember it being a problem, so maybe John Z. was right about that after all.
The 1971 Buick LeSabre convertible that my family had (and that I COALed about a while back) had arctic cold A/C that had no problem turning the interior into a meat locker with the top up. Ditto for my grandfather’s 73 Impala, and I’m pretty discriminating about my A/C, as everyone here knows.
Perhaps dealers were repairing these as part of pre-delivery inspection or when customers complained?
Although the era is waning, a decent body on frame cop car was a good choice for cheap fun for decades. My last “fast” car was a 2003 P71 Crown Vic that I lucked into at a used car lot circa 2009. It was like new and only had 21,000 miles on the clock. The price was south of 5k.
At the time I had a major addiction to speeding, and I built it for that purpose. Living in Baltimore at the time, there were so many of these on the road as official vehicles of various types, I figured that If I kept it stock and pristine I wouldn’t get pulled over despite super legal speeds, which turned out to be correct. I had it painted Bullet green and made a few performance modifications that really woke it up. Also installed were a set of camera defeating plate lenses. In the 4 years of ownership there were no speeding tickets. No mechanical issues either.
One of many notable long distance cannonball style jaunts was taking my mother to a family funeral, she never said a word despite hitting 120 on several occasions. For no specific reason (other than getting old) I decided my days of speeding were done, and said goodbye to it in 2014.
That does sound like a very effective car for your purposes at the time. The math wouldn’t have worked out for me; the speeding impunity would’ve come at the cost of having to drive a Ford panther car, and I despise the damn things.
Despised? That seems a trifle harsh. While I don’t worship at the temple of the panther, there is much good in the platform. Are there specific elements you dislike?
It’s a Ford.
Their design and styling right from ’79 clear on up to the end; their Soviet-cockroach build quality; the way their transmissions sound; the way their starters sound; their hideous safety defects; their really stupid engine problems; the Bernz-o-matiC electrical systems; the look and feel of their interiors, controls, and displays; their cheap and nasty lighting systems. I really mean it—despise, entire—past and present tense.
As you can see from today’s COAL, this is not a childish Chev-versus-Ford thing; I’m sure as hell not trying to claim my Caprice was such a stellar automobile. But my experience with the Stinkoln Clown Car made a very bad first impression, and every (I mean every) time I reasoned that a bazillion cop shops, taxi operators, and great-grandparents couldn’t possibly be wrong and tried out another Panther, I had the same reaction: absolutely not.
Now, if Ford had brought over the latter-day Australian Falcons complete with their up-to-date 4-litre inline Six, and had managed not to “Americanise” them to death, that might well be a Ford I’d have a hard and interested look at. But Panthers? No. I will not have one. I know there are lots of people who love these cars. Good for them; there will surely be plenty of cars for them to play with for the foreseeable future. I don’t care to argue with them; nobody’s mind will be changed, so I’ll just be over here not taking up a Panther car they might like.
Fantastic response!
A well-reasoned response, Daniel. That’s a lot not to like.
I often felt our Aussie Fords would have done well up there, if the heaters were good enough! But we were repeatedly denied access to LHD export markets, as Ford US wanted to protect sales of Panthers (so the magazines told us). Which strikes me as rather silly, considering your long list of things to dislike. Surely it would’ve been better for the bottom line to sell a good but imported Aussie Ford rather than have people walk out of the showroom. Surely it would’ve been even better to design and build the Panthers right in the first place.
From the business-case perspective, Ford were standing on very sturdy ice. The Panthers were highly profitable, with tooling long paid off, so why mess with it?
Here is what a Ford engineer told me in 2004 (he also told me the North American plants were not capable of putting together the Australian Falcon, and went into credible detail about it—and he said, probably correctly, that Ford were not about to piss off the UAW by importing Falcons):
“In ’98-`99, Ford was considering bringing the (AU) Falcon XR8 over to the US to sell as a luxury/sport car. I was between “jobs,” as it were, and a friend of mine in Product Development got me assigned to the crack team of engineers assembled to evaluate the feasibility of federalizing a Falcon. Of course, I was involved in chassis evaluation. That was an awesome car (and the BA is even better). It used what at the time was the Explorer 5.0, so it had a strong bottom-end, but also had good-breathing GT-40P heads. I think it made about 250 hp, and I think like 305 lb·ft, or close to it; bottom line: the car was all torque, with a nice helping of horsepower, but it had a hard time putting that power down `cause it was relatively light. The AU platform used an evolution of Ford’s “Control Blade” IRS originally developed for the Ford Sierra (aka Merkur XR4ti in the US) that did an excellent job of controlling geometry, but lacked the ability to really control the torque loads delivered by the engine, so wheel hop and suspension wind-up were really a problem. To try and counter that, Ford (but mostly Tickford) had compensated with stiffer springs and a thicker rear antiroll bar, which made it ride “hard” and oversteer (but I thought it rode and handled as a car such as that should, even though about 80% of Americans would disagree). Wasn’t a whole lot we could do. It takes a concentrated driver to handle a car with those characteristics, which Australians can and most Americans could not, so that presented a litigious issue and a definite vehicle dynamics obstacle. Plus it is a dedicated RHD car, so there’d be a number of low-volume, custom parts to be made to convert it to LHD, not to mention a specialized conversion line/facility to accommodate it (although Tickford seemed to make RHD conversion of Mustangs sellable, and they needed a LOT more done than the Falcon would).
“Plus the bonehead powertrain engineers wanted to replace the sublimely good BTR automatic with a 4R70W to reduce [mainly] service costs, which would’ve completely killed the car’s performance (the 4R70W is NOT a performance-oriented transmission; it is better suited for use as a boat anchor). And work on the “clean sheet” DEW98 platform (LS, S-Type) was already underway at Jaguar, and it’s approximately the same size car and configuration. The XR8 was a sedan that would run with a Mustang GT, but it would’ve retailed for about $50,000-$60,000. A great car indeed, but not $50,000 great. Sadly there really was no place in the market for it at that time in this country. So Ford bailed.
“The Falcon 6 would have less tendency to understeer than the V8, but both cars have remarkably tuned dynamics. The BA (and especially the BA Mark II) in general is better balanced than any evolution of the AU chassis (the AUIII was close). Still uses an iteration of the old “Control Blade” IRS, but with slightly different geometry that helps keep the rear from winding-up when it gets smacked with [up to] 405 lb·ft of torque (that torque figure is from the F6 Typhoon and Tornado (ute) – the latest offerings from FPV that hold the title of producing the most torque of any Australian-made car (and ute) – which features a turbo intercooled 365 hp version of the humble but capable Barra 182 4.0L 24v I-6).
“The interesting thing about the Falcon (and the Commodore) is that in addition to being very nimble and stable, they also ride very smoothly. This is mostly due to the fact that the majority of Australia’s secondary roads are clay/crushed gravel, so kinda like secondary roads in Michigan during winter, they can get rough during the wet season, and the suspensions of cars there have to be able to take the ruts and holes without beating the occupants to death. American cars have traditionally been sprung to handle rough terrain with perfect smoothness, but that tuning becomes detrimental when you have to do anything other than go completely straight. American “performance” suspensions, therefore, have simply consisted of higher-rate springs to control body motion, which has the negative effect of translating the impact of every pebble or pavement crack you run over, and beats your kidneys to death.
“How the Australians get their cars to absorb a potted dirt road and handle the turns of a road course all in one tuning is quite remarkable, really. It has a lot to do with the configuration of the suspensions themselves, but the real trick is in how they match spring and damping rates. The problem with American cars is that they’re made so blasted cheaply, and their structures are so flimsy, that you really have little to work with if you’re trying to stabilize a car and improve ride quality, so everything they routinely do in Europe and Australia, we can’t do here.
Forget trying to incorporate an “expensive” double wishbone front suspension or IRS rear drive; its all cheap MacPherson struts and trailing links to get the job done. The best thing Ford had years ago was the MN12 platform, but they wanted it soft. So it was soft and heavy and expensive to make. Now the DEW98 has taken its place, but is severely underutilized and cheaply-made.”
Dont get too enthusiastic, Aussie Falcons do not handle well at all on twisty roads they can prove to be lethal intial understeer the snap oversteer is not a great handling car, Ford actually withdrew base model Falcons from the NZ rental fleets scared renters complain and dont buy Falcons and substituted XR6s mechanically there is no difference once Tickford left the building but the wider rims and tyres mask most of the problems up to 100kmh, and the tall gearing makes them quite gutless at the 100kmh speed limit short life transmissions didnt help with the AU series either, GMH beefed up the Commodore trans and introduced 100,000km service intervals, Ford introduced the same service intervals but did nothing to the tranny so just out of warranty failures were commonplace, Repco where my brother worked at the time were overstocked with clutch packs for Falcon AU transmissions one reason my brother bought one did a triple flush on the trans untill the fluid came out red not black and drove that car gently untill it fell apart or more accurately moved from Queensland to Victoria where the car would need a roadworthy cert to be registered it didnt have a snowball in hells chance of passing, he died Feb 2020 in a XR8 made the news doing it they arent so special in a crash either great taxis but thats about all.
An fascinating rant from the engineer. Most odd about the IRS and axle tramp – one presumes he never tried the live axle fitted to most AU’s!
Bryce is right in one respect – the BTR gearbox. Certainly smooth and responsive, but usually not long-lived. But I don’t agree the Falcs handle badly. The AU’s all understeered a bit much, and COULD eventually get a bit taily, but you were trying pretty hard by then. The contemporary VT Commodore was a lot better, though it too could oversteer (wagon especially) because the rear was simple trailing arms, but again, really pushing on by the the time it did.
The point made about ride/handling balance is fascinating, as this old-style French-ish combination (without the roll) was indeed a notable feature for years until the end. Also lots of knowledge of road-noise suppression, a massive issue on coarse-chip Oz roads, and the Achille’s heel of many a posh German job as good long-distance cruisers.
The cost stuff is important, I suspect. The Falc and Commode were never especially cheap cars in local money, the market was tariff-protected and internally-protected (buy-Aus rules for the biggest market, the fleets) and perhaps this is why the end result was better cars than the US: the US market market was far too open and competitive, as the $60K Falcon example above shows. (Btw, it’s all bemusing from here, where these cars were never considered very well-made in the first place: shit, the Panthers et al must be bad!)
Daniel, thanks so much for the engineer’s viewpoint on our Falcons. If your typing is anything like mine (usu. two errors per line to go back and correct), that’s quite a lot to input. Much appreciated!
Interestingly, when Ford tried to sell American cars here during the nineties and oughties (Probe, Mustang, Taurus) quality was one thing the press always commented on, as in lack of.
Now how did this come into a thread about the Caprice – oh, that’s right, there’s the way back….. 🙂
I touch-type with imperfect but very good accuracy at well over 100 words per minute when I really get going. I once fell asleep while typing a paper the night before it was due, my first year in university. The keyboard rattle of my continued typing woke me a moment or two later, and I found I’d ended a sentence “(…) but it wasn’t Jenna’s orange doid”. Too bad I wasn’t pretending to be able to play an instrument; that’d’ve been an ideal name for a bad college band.
That said, that engineer’s view was pulled from a 2004 email conversation in my archives, so it was mostly copypasta.
I reckon I couldn’t get away with anything like this conversational branch in a post about Fords, but this what we’re doing in a post about a Chev is a bit less confrontationally head-on about it. 😉
Putting “Jenna’s Orange Doid” into my future band names file for reference.
I am curious if you ever got any experience with the 1992+ Panthers – they felt like completely different cars from the 1980-89 versions. I am no great fan of the 80s versions but liked the 90s versions quite a lot.
They are very much included in my rant. To me they look, feel, act, and drive like…maybe not quite toy cars, but pretend cars. Sort of the car equivalent of the Potemkin villages the film industry uses: looks like a car, makes carlike noises and does some carlike things, but the illusion buckles under closer examination.
All the ’92-’97 American Ford product seem like cartoonishly-styled plastic crap to me, including the Panthers. The ’98-up Panthers, to me, just look like par-melted bars of soap with very little thought, care, or design in their design (Crown Victoria/Grand Marquis) or gloopy, artificial, glitzy, pretend-luxury (Town Car).
Mechanically, I find the ’92-up Panthers at least as objectionable as the earlier cars, minus yet more points because the lousy headlamps are the only available kind (…and the alternators…oh, and the starters…and…)
If I were forced to pick a Panther car, I guess it would be about an ’87 Grand Marquis with the early base-model Crown Victoria front end grafted on, perhaps with some additional cleanup. And oh hell yes it would have the augmented gas tank fire protection equipment Ford eventually rolled their eyes and grudgingly offered as an option—only to cops—once they’d dragged their feet clear down to the bone. And once I was done picking it, I’d sell it to someone else.
Another outstanding Daniel Stern adventure. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your writing, Daniel. Please keep up the good work. I’m a huge fan.
Thanks kindly, Dennis!
Great piece, reminds me of an epic adventure a friend had with a ’96 Impala SS. That car didn’t have many issues at all, but it was nonetheless a colorful experience. Thanks!
We had an ’89 Buick that still had the glass composite lenses… so much better than the plastic. I understand cost, weight, and styling issues, but I do miss them.
Apropos of nothing, noticing that green Maple Leaf on the Canadian Tire store… how many maple leaves does the average Canadian see in a day? I feel like if you go to school for logo or graphic design in Canada, there must be a one-semester class where they teach you how to incorporate the leaf into your design.
That class is in American graphic design classes, and it is called “How to Pretend to Be Canadian: Slap a Maple Leaf On It, Eh!”
Glass lenses aren’t necessarily good—some were made of cheap, thin, fragile glass, and of course it doesn’t matter what the lens is made of if the optical prescription is lousy, the manufacturing sloppy, or both.
But leaving those aside, glass lenses did not degrade like polycarbonate lenses. This is more than just a minor “dangit”. Pedestrian deaths are rising even as other kinds of traffic-related fatalities are dropping, and the nighttime pedestrian kill rate is rising faster and higher than the daytime rate. One very rigourously data-backed reason for the increase is an unintuitive one: headlamp degradation. I’m sorry I can’t show you the data here, because it was compiled and analysed for a specific purpose and is not released for general publication. But I will describe it for you pointwise:
• About 75% of traffic-related pedestrian fatalities happen after dark.
• From 2009 to 2016, daytime pedestrian fatalities increased 16%, while nighttime pedestrian fatalities increased by 82%. Since 1994 it has grown steadily more and more hazardous to be a pedestrian at night versus in daylight in the United States.
• To gain approval, plastic materials used in headlamp lenses are required to pass an outdoor-exposure test where they’re left out in the sun for 3 years, after which they are allowed to have not more than a certain percentage of haze (there is a very sturdy case to be made that this requirement is much too lax; just walk down any street or through any car park).
• The average age of a vehicle on US roads in 1990 was about 7.6 years (2000, 8.9 years. 2014, 11.4 years. 2018, 11.8 years. 2020, 12.1 years). Over a quarter of vehicles presently on US roads are at least 16 years old.
• Headlamp lens haze diffuses and scatters what should be a focused beam of light, severely degrading the driver’s ability to see while simultaneously increasing glare to other drivers. To put numbers on it: a batch of headlamps properly made of approved materials, used and exposed to the sun for four years, put out only 32% of the light they originally produced. Maximum intensity within the beam was only 23% of the original and intended value. These lamps, as aged, did not come close to meeting minimum performance requirements. A recent AAA study came to similar conclusions.
• Headlamp lenses degrade faster and worse in hot, sunny states than in cold, cloudy ones. Properly analyzed and compensated for confounds, the data show the night/day pedestrian fatality ratio in high-haze states is over triple the ratio in low-haze states. Five states—Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas—accounted for almost half of all pedestrian deaths in 2018. All five are bright, sunny, hot states.
Bottom line: Ford devised a cheap and lax standard for plastic headlight lenses in 1983. NHTSA said “K, whatever you want is fine with us”. People die as a result.
“Five states—Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas—accounted for almost half of all pedestrian deaths in 2018”
They’re also states where it’s too hot to walk in daylight much of the year, and they have large numbers of homeless with the milder winters. To the north of them, it’s too cold to walk at night much of the year.
I suspect better DWI enforcement has also contributed to the fatality increase. More drunks/addicts are on foot now. We lose one on the railroad tracks every few years. It doesn’t seem like the criminal gangs are worried about the rise in shootings the last 7 years, but who knows if they aren’t trying new tactics?
@Ralph L
I’m sure all of those factors come into play with the increase in pedestrian deaths, but I wouldn’t be dismissive of the headlamp degradation issue at all. I moved from Montana to Arizona some years ago, and immediately noticed that UV damage to vehicles was notably worse here than in Montana. It’s not uncommon to see extreme headlamp cataracts on a fair percentage of cars in a parking lot… like vehicles that needed new headlights ten years ago. Many of these vehicles are still serviceable, but they’re at a point where almost no owner would spend the money for replacements- even the substandard cheap knock-offs. Unfortunately, there is a huge selection of cheap LED retrofit “bulbs” available, which hobble performance even more while blinding oncoming traffic even more.
I followed a 1987-91 Ford pickup a couple nights ago, that was equipped with dark blue LED bulbs behind opaque yellow lenses, and I’m very sure he/she would have had a hard time seeing a pedestrian in a fluorescent safety vest. That’s not an exaggeration.
“I suspect better DWI enforcement has also contributed to the fatality increase. More drunks/addicts are on foot now.”
Sorry but this is ridiculous.
Virtually 100 percent of pedestrian deaths in this country are caused by motorist error, motorist negligence and/or infrastructure that is hostile to walking.
The contents of the victims’ blood and breath are irrelevant, other than for victim-blaming.
As a California resident I’d say more pedestrian accidents are caused by them selves walking in traffic .
They simply step off the curb without looking what’s coming .
I grew up Down East where jay walking is normal , you know to look before you leap and so don’t get hit .
When my son was 17 we went to New England on a Motocycle trip and in Boston (Alliston precisely) I made a point of jaywalking across a busy 4 lane street that had a cop car coming ~ they watched me evaluate the on coming traffic and sped behind us, co comment .
Just like when dealing with firearms or rotary wing air craft, situational awareness is paramount .
Yes, some drivers are idiots too but it’s _YOU_ who will be injured or killed .
Last week two street racers blew through a red light directly in front of me, had I not been paying attention I surely would have been center punched in my driver’s door .
-Nate
Nate, you might want to look into the history of “jaywalking” to expand your perspective a bit before making a final decision on whose fault it all is. See here, here, here, and here.
Well, I wouldn’t quite pin it 100% on motorists.
Pedestrians have some responsibilities too, per Nate.
A pedestrian/cyclist can’t just “pop out of nowhere” to enter a roadway and expect to be safe.
What about injury/death during the somewhat common phenomena of napping on the railroad line? Is that 100% railroads’ fault?
Since this boil-up I’ve learned a few things.
My previous hunch “not supported by data” that car-bike crashes seem through the roof IS the actual reality. It’s recently been
O-fficially recognized
Another thing I learned is that the so-called quantified data being relied on is often not worth as much as the organized magnetic particles being used to present it. Major case of garbage-in-garbage-out has been going on.
The topic went cold so I didn’t bother to report my findings. If it goes undead or a more relevant discussion starts, I may.
I’ll grant you that most pedestrian deaths in controlled intersections are the fault of the driver. A clear example would be 19th Avenue through the Sunset in San Francisco. A long street from 280 to Golden Gate Park that has a traffic light at every cross street and there are lots. You cannot get through all of them from Park Merced to Lincoln without stopping unless around 2:00 AM in the morning. I have done it twice moving at precisely at 31 mph. Failing that you will make at most four lights in daytime. Pedestrians get hit here because people are forcing that last light so driver’s fault for sure. Traffic too heavy on 3 lanes for someone to just walk out.
However, in the Richmond District where I lived, it was not uncommon for people to ignore their red light to cross over from one side of any cross street to the other side along Geary right in front of an oncoming car. Had it happen to me several times but will leave it at that. When I took my young son into the area when he was six, I no longer lived there, the first thing he commented on was all the people walking against the red light. These are controlled streets where people intentionally ignored protocol.
On side streets with cross walks I always look before I will cross in this day and age. OTOH, when I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1966 I was amazed that when I was in waiting at a cross walk to cross the cars actually stopped for me to cross. Slowly that changed and now few people outside of me will stop to let the pedestrian cross instead they have to wait till they get a chance in this uncontrolled situation. I never assume it is still 1966 anymore.
Another issue… you spot the ambling pedestrian and out of courtesy you slow or stop to give him a chance to cross. Driver behind you “knows” you’re just a dawdler so moves to roar around…
So sometimes it’s actually more courteous and safe to leave the pedestrian waiting for a better break.
Interesting reading Daniel ;
As a long time bicyclist and over 50 years Motocyclist I understand the basic physics of a 200# person being hit by a 3,000 +/- # vehicle, better than most (I almost died in traffic collisions and now have to walk with a cane and sleep in a chair because of these basic physics) .
I also drive a lot both in town and long distance .
I’m one of those very few who actually stops for people in the street, I too remember the Summer of 1969 when I was new to California and like many tourists stopped to gawp and was surprised when the traffic all came to a stop for me, this on a major thoroughfare .
I have no beef at all with those who look, evaluate the traffic then dart out to cross ~ they clearly “get” it .
I have to deal daily with urban and suburban mooks who simply don’t bother looking before walking or running into the stream of traffic .
Same deal with the brainless dolts who are too busy texting to bother looking before merging into my lane at 65 + MPH .
Yes, sharing the road is the right thing to do .
No, expecting moving traffic to slow down for you, isn’t realistic not overly intelligent .
With freedom comes responsibility and accountability .
-Nate
Daniel, not only are your articles wonderful, your comments are insightful as well. As you said, anybody can tell in any parking lot the majority of cars have severely degraded headlamps. It’s like we’re all driving 1990s Dodge Intrepids.
Oh, just joking about the maple leaf thing, no insult intended 🙂
No offence taken!
I dont know about lights on American cars but Ive driven a lot of American trucks the big ones not Pickups and their lights are terrible Australian built Kenworths are better but not much Aussie built CAT tractor units have great lights but they are LED type LED replacements in a K108 I was in a couple of years ago might as well have been candles on the bumper.
Kenworths for the Australian market have substantially upgraded (bigger, more powerful) headlamps than the US-market trucks.
“Ford devised a cheap and lax standard for plastic headlight lenses in 1983. NHTSA said “K, whatever you want is fine with us”. People die as a result.”
Sounds exactly right. Our Government is almost wholly-owned by Big Corporations; they get whatever they want until some larger special-interest group demands something different.
Every plastic-headlight car ever made should be recalled for cloudy lenses (safety defect); and the replacements should have a lifetime warranty against lack of transparency.
Schurkey, however, let’s not presume that large demanding special interest groups are any better at pushing common sense. IE the big effort to commingle traffic.
The spike in collisions being blamed on lighting seems to also coincide with the timeline of when it started to become so fashionable to mix pedestrian, bicycle, skateboard, etc. traffic with heavy motor vehicles.
However, not having the splendid views from on high in ivory towers stocked with voluminous statistics and data, but instead, just seeing all the mayhem near-misses, and, unfortunately, some direct hits of types that didn’t happen with previous traffic conventions, what could I possibly know about it?
I know, heard it before, statistics and data don’t support my narrow small world view. Traffic is traffic, there should be no distinction by type, it’s actually best to mix it all together, data supports this. Okay.
Your guesses, assumptions, characterisations, and pet theories here do not align well with reality. Neither would anyone else’s, including my own. That’s why these kinds of matters are studied, quantified, and characterised with scientific rigour, not by guess and by gosh. There’s an enormous amount of sturdy, legitimate research in this field, and it serves well as a basis for sound regulatory policy. But there’s also a variety of economic, political, and personal interests that tend to pollute the process.
Daniel, I don’t see how your almost verbatim repeated usual comment of: “…your guesses, assumptions, characterisations, and pet theories here do not align well with reality” is a relevant response nor accurately addresses my comment? You may need some new material.
The irony is that my observations which you seek to disparage as meaningless are in fact supported by the same research you cite.
To recap, I said that in my humble unscientific observation crashes between motor vehicles and other traffic seems way up since the two have been aggressively mandated to commingle on the roadway.
I just checked my hunch and analysts of NHTSA data say that such crashes of mixed traffic resulting in death are up 50+% in a recent ten year period. No, I didn’t review every accident report, so it’s true, I’m making the assumption that the data is good.
Statisticians are great at putting dots on paper. But then, they’re left scratching their heads, wondering what it means, and why? Sometimes for years.
Here’s where yours truly, a common dummy, can help. I can nicely connect the dots and explain in simple terms how and why there are places where traffic doesn’t mix well.
Ambulance, bent bicycle in the road, eureka!, I can make the connection. If either the car or bike weren’t at the same place there wouldn’t have been a crash.
JimD: I’m not really interested in jumping into this debate, but if you’re going cite NHTSA stats (or any other), you need to link to them. All stats are subject to interpretation (and misinterpretation). It’s not ok to claim there’s stats that back your POV without citations.
Frankly, I’m a bit perplexed about your claim that “since the two (motor vehicles and other traffic) have been aggressively mandated to commingle on the roadway”. How was this “mandated”? And who created these mandates? Citations, please, not just your subjective opinion.
I’ll attach a link and snippet that seconds my amateur observations.
There are plenty of others chewing on the same data.
https://www.pedbikeinfo.org/factsfigures/facts_safety.cfm
“Pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities increased by 50.7 percent in the ten-year period between 2009 and 2018. During that same time period, total traffic fatalities increased by 7.9 percent.
…Though there is not an official accounting of total crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists or injuries sustained by these road users at the national level, there are estimates each year from the Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS). Studies have shown that pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities represent only the “top of the iceberg” with respect to all crashes involving these modes. Furthermore, research has demonstrated consistent underreporting of crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists, so as many as 55 percent of pedestrian crashes and even more bicyclist crashes may be missing from police-reported crash data.”
Now the Caprice topic has really jumped its tracks. Lol
But to briefly answer Paul’s question…
As to commingling of traffic, searching “Complete Streets” will give a good overview of the concept.
“The concept of Complete Streets encompasses many approaches to planning, designing, and operating roadways and rights of way with all users in mind to make the transportation network safer and more efficient. Complete Street policies are set at the state, regional, and local levels and are frequently supported by roadway design guidelines.
Complete Streets approaches vary based on community context. They may address a wide range of elements, such as sidewalks, bicycle lanes, bus lanes, public transportation stops, crossing opportunities, median islands, accessible pedestrian signals, curb extensions, modified vehicle travel lanes, streetscape, and landscape treatments. Complete Streets reduce motor vehicle-related crashes and pedestrian risk, as well as bicyclist risk when well-designed bicycle-specific infrastructure is included (Reynolds, 2009). They can promote walking and bicycling by providing safer places to achieve physical activity through transportation.”
As we gearheads well know, idealised drawing board concepts often don’t transition well to an existing reality.
What big new effort to commingle traffic? CompleteStreets’ point is to make the existing users MORE ABLE TO OPERATE SAFELY within the existing geography and user base. People were always walking and riding bikes on the same streets as where cars and trucks were driving, where have you been? I’ve been riding my bike and walking around the cities I’ve lived in and travelled to for over four decades now, I was never separated from other vehicular traffic, really, where do you live that this has been so? CompleteStreets implementation has served to delineate different zones within the same geography in order to keep them MORE separate and distinct, not less.
There can be many reasons why there are now more fatalities. Possibly more people walking and biking more miles in total is one. Perhaps less attentive drivers, that seems to check out. Perhaps drivers driving faster or not being able to see out of their vehicle as well or the vehicles themselves being larger, which is true. Perhaps walkers and drivers and bicyclists on their cell phone or cell watches and paying less attention, certainly more so now than a decade ago when this ten-year study began, yep I can see that too, the smartphone only became common in the last decade…Nobody was looking into their hand a decade and a half ago while walking across the street…
Here’s an actual link that explains CompleteStreets, not hard to find, not sure why you couldn’t just link it. It’s a cut and paste operation.
https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-streets It’s not a new program to put bikes into car traffic as you seen to interpret it as.
You seem to be assigning blame to fit your notions. That 50% increase in accidents that sounds HUGE is about a 2000 lives difference. Lots of people but small fry in the overall context. Less than the number of fools that will die in the next month since they decided not to get a Covid shot in order to own the libs…
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html – deaths are up week over week, 99% non-vaxxers.
In the end I think this link below is the one you probably should have posted and where I think your link got some of its data:
https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/20-1319-AAAFTS_Pedestrian-Fatalities-Brief_FINAL-122220.pdf
Here’s the key paragraph from that:
“Also consistent
with previous studies, results indicate that the largest
increases in pedestrian fatalities in recent years occurred
in urban areas, on arterials, at non-intersection locations,
and in darkness, which collectively accounted for nearly
the entire increase in pedestrian fatalities. Moreover,
over half of the entire increase in pedestrian fatalities
occurred specifically at non-intersection locations on
urban non-freeway arterials, the majority of which
involved pedestrians crossing at these locations.”
In a nutshell, pedestrians are jaywalking in the dark and getting hit by SUVs at 40mph. Color me shocked. Not. I see it every evening and night, the same with idiots on bikes running lights, stopsigns, not having lights on, etc. This has nothing to do with some phantom program you invented about how the gub’mint is since a decade ago pushing those people onto the same roads. That hasn’t changed at all, or certainly not for the worse, just people aren’t using what they are given, instead thinking they are immortal until they aren’t. Use the crosswalks, wait for the light, look both ways, make sure you have eye contact and you won’t get run over, same now as when I was taught it in kindergarten…
Daniel’s probably going to waste his evening and find and post better data with actual clear links to refute everything you claimed, again, just like the lighting thing last month. Don’t fall for his trap this time. lol indeed.
What are you talking about? What comment got taken down?
Daniel, Do you have specific experience with lighting design? You seem to be knowledgeable, which is cool.
Did we really benefit any from the move away from universal replaceable sealed beam headlights? It has allowed great freedom for stylists, but is our actual lighting better?
I can say from experience that the 91-96 B-body headlights are weak. I never had the adjustments broken like yours had. I will say that the plastic doesn’t seem to cloud as readily as some others. I think that the 93-96 Fleetwood version had glass lenses.
Vehicle lighting is my professional field. Sometimes I wish I knew less about it; I have no idea what it’s like to think of car lights in terms no more complicated than working/not, on/off, bright/dim, flashing/steady, and red/amber/white—as I assume normal people do.
The question you ask has a complicated answer; it could justify a long and detailed lecture or two. The best nutshell answer I can give is that average new-vehicle headlamp performance has gradually risen over the years, the spread from worst to best (and therefore from average to best or to worst) is very much wider than it was in the sealed-beam era, and the average old-vehicle headlamp performance is much worse in the plastic-lens era than it was with glass lenses.
You’re right that GM used a relatively good grade of polycarbonate and coating at that time; their plastic headlamps of that era deteriorated less and slower than those from Ford and Chrysler.
I’ll bet the long answer to my question might make an interesting CC article! I don’t recall any articles like that, but maybe I missed it. You could make your curse of knowledge a blessing to the rest of us!
There are a bunch of lighting-related articles on my docket. I’ll get to them, though it might not be til after my COAL series ends. We’ll see.
Excellent piece, Daniel!
I ran a fleet of GM B bodies and when the Bubble Cars became available on the used market at a reasonable price, I bought two, also 9C1s.
Buying a cop car at an auction is a hit and miss affair. Most cop machines have the bag run off them by the time they are being sold. There are exceptions, but get ready to replace a whole lot of stuff. It’s not that big a deal because the parts are available and cheap.
That said, I had two Bubble Cars and both sucked bigtime compared to the earlier cars. The extra weight of the larger body was not compensated by stronger chassis components. The brakes on a B Body were marginal at best, but in the Bubble Cars they were totally inadequate for our use. On an older car we’d get about 30,000 km on a set of front brakes (about three months’ driving) but on a Whale (as I soon started calling them) I was lucky to get 20,000 km.
I never had a lot of luck with the 700 series transmissions which would fail within a few months of taxi service. Whenever I put a cab on the road I had a checklist of things to replace before use: new belt(s), water pump, HEI module, transmission, alternator and all fluids. That’s because GM alternators of the time were crap. My Acura TL was eighteen years old when I sold it and it still had the original alternator but no a GM car of the B Body I ever had went more than a year. I tried new units, rebuilt units, reman units and they were all the same. I started to have them rebuilt at a good local shop and just swapped them out for a rebuilt unit.
These were still good cars but the non-9C1 cars were, in my opinion, better for daily use. The 9C1 was just too spartan and hard riding for both the driver and passengers.
My family’s taxi hell experience ended with the death of my father in 1997. Even then pre-1990 B Bodies were getting hard to find. Most local operators had switched to Luminas at that point and by 2005, the Prius had taken over. Operators love them.
A genuine GM bafflement: the ’72-’87(ish?) GM alternators were widely considered among the best—if not the best. Then GM evidently decided alternators that worked well and lasted long were not the right kind.
I didn’t find my 9C1 spartan; the heavy-duty seats were comfy and it had the power windows and locks and whatnot. Nor did I find it hard-riding. But I did find it offensively ugly from both an æsthetic and an engineering/execution standpoint, leaving aside the previous-owner wear and tear.
The CS Series alternators were designed to better fit in tighter under-hood spaces, while producing more amperage… so there was an valid reason for the design. What I don’t understand is how they got past any sort of durability testing and pushed into production as designed. By packing ~100 amps worth of shit in a 35 amp box, they were a thermal management nightmare. Rectifriers got hot enough to burn the grease out of rear bearings, front bearings were too small…
Those weaknesses were often exacerbated by poorly chosen mounting locations. My Lumina has the alternator packed into a little nook at the top rear of the engine, almost pressed into the hood insulation; it draws its most of its cooling air off the rear exhaust manifold. Brilliant. They finally redesigned it into the CS130D, which had a much more open case design, and mounted the rectifrier outside the case- a much more effective design. It also sensed operating temperature and would stop charging if it overheated.
“Rectifriers got hot enough to burn….”
I see what you did there!
The fun part is GM could have bought (much) better alternators from Nippondenso, I’m guessing probably for less than it cost them to engineer, tool, produce, and warrant their own CS units.
The CS-130 was full of problems. It was designed to be a throw-away piece and originally individual repair parts were not available. The design replaced traditional diodes with a silicone rectifier ‘stack’ which was not particularly reliable, The CS-130 was capable of quite high current output for the day, but it also generated a LOT of heat when working hard (discharged battery in particular). That characteristic didn’t bode well with the inadequate cooling fans and small bearings, all of which could contribute to spectacular failures. Early attempts by the aftermarket to rebuild the CS-130 created even more issues, in particular poor stator connections (welded at the factory and not intended to be disconnected because this thing is not rebuildable…) which made a hot running alternator even hotter. In typical GM fashion, after a few years a redesigned CS-130 was introduced (identifiable by an internal front fan) that corrected all the issues. I have noticed a lot of late model GM trucks have Denso alternators. I wonder if Denso’s spin-off from Toyota Group made the choice easier for GM……
Daniel, what was your major at UMich?
Oh, y’know, Applied Cluelessness or something—actually it was General Studies: twice the upper-division coursework, broad distribution requirements, no specific declared major.
The Whale looked a bit better when they enlarged the rear wheel opening in ’93. Stupidly, they made the same mistake in the bloated ’94 Deville, which wasn’t rectified until ’97 (with a wider track). In its case, they also widened and raised the nose so the middle section of the car didn’t look as large.
The full wheel arch was an un-defacement, for sure. So was the little reverse-angle treatment at the trailing lower corner of the rear quarter glass (first seen as an appliqué on the ’94 Impala SS, then built in on all the ’95-’96 Caprices). So were the larger ’95-’96 sideview mirrors.
But the turd still didn’t take a shine, regardless of these dabs of polish.
Fear of car dealers you need proper laws enacted over here we have a sale of goods act meaning items sold by a dealer have to be ‘of merchantable quality’ in other words if it breaks within 12 months its the dealers problem not yours, car dealers hate it and even large car auction outfits are covered by it as they are ‘licensed motor vehicle dealers’ includes online auctions with $1.00 reserve on trademe.
That’s fine for the likes of New Zealand, but it would never fly in the United States of Ferenginar (LOLROFL, next you’ll be saying Americans ought to have…I don’t know…health care or something!)
Yes there is an entire automotive industry built on the back of guaranteed obsolescence,
Thank you for a very enjoyable article. I don’t think I would have predicted that a giant American boat of a car (which is how I think of this generation of Caprice, even if it was somewhat smaller than the previous)…much less an ex-cop car…would have followed the Volvo.
I don’t think that it’s a “weird psychological thing” that a good used car should cost around $2500 – $3000. It’s all about expectations, and I feel that for many of us, those are set (for better or worse) early on. I feel the same way.
And anyway, as Hazel Motes (via Flannery O’Connor … or is that the other way around?) says “No man with a good car needs to be justified!”. Then again, Hazel’s used car experience seemed to parallel yours rather closely.
Oh look, there’s even a Valiant in that scene! And an earlier-generation Caprice a bit into it. (excellent film and even better novella. Filmed in Oxford and Macon, GA…)
(someday I’ll figure out how to embed links in comments as expertly as you 😉 )
Good grief…that is quite the accent!
Another fun read. I am learning about a lot of useful products reading your COAL series. First there was Ox-Gard, now Mopar RTV and Tri-Flow. I think I need to pick up some of each, “just in case”.
I experienced the CC Effect. Two days ago I was driving by a Canadian Tire store and I was passed by one of these. It had been ages since I had seen one. It was black, in decent shape but not pristine. We were stopped by a red light, but when it changed he took off and that was the last I saw of him.
I can do without Tri-Flow, but not without Ox-Gard and Mopar black and Valco aluminum RTVs (oh, and one of these clever widgets). Also a bottle of I.H.G.S.. Some others, too, but I oughtta keep ’em quiet til it’s time for their own CC Toolbox posts.
I don’t know for sure but after all these car stories maybe you would be better served by public transportation or Uber. Just thinking out loud.
Whoops! That’s not actually what the punchbowl’s for; the toilet’s down the hall. But thanks for your input, though.
Your stories, themselves, are great. However, it seems that you spend an inordinate amount of time repairing every car you happen to purchase which is probably why everyone gets a kick out of the story. I know I do as I chuckle away saying get rid of it, now…
Customarily, thinking isn’t out loud; it’s quietly inside the head to consider how you might sound to others before talking out loud for all to hear. I find it’s best to stick to that convention.
I’m really enjoying the stories for their content, and the way it’s presented. I’m getting my kicks by relating to the events presented and remembering my own adventures in car ownership. That includes successes, failures, learning as I go. Some stuff came easy, and some was a pain in the butt with many skinned knuckles, burnt fingers, and occasionally brain cells left smoldering before they grew. I probably spend more time on this site than I should, reading some good stuff from many of the authors here. I especially like Stern’s brand of humor, and way he presents these adventures…
Wouldn’t be much of a story if it went like: “I once bought and ex-police cruiser Shamu Caprice, fixed a couple things, then proceeded to drive it for awhile. I had to replace an alternator and a transmission once, but I would rate the car as a mediocre overall.”
The models of this era Crapiece quickly disappeared from our locale.
For one reason only:
Two brothers from the Mideast had set up shop buying and selling used cars. They had what is traditionally known as a ‘lemon orchard’; they went to the local auto auctions and picked up every one of these that came thru the lanes. NONE made it to their lot. They were quickly loaded into containers and sent back to their homeland where each and every one was presold to a guy who could not wait to get his hands on one of these GM whales.
Once the competition figured out what was going on, these two brothers had to up their anty on their wholesale bids.
Which they did. It didn’t matter because they were getting 5-6 times whatever they paid from the buyers in the desert.
Makes me wonder how many of the older folks who had these out on the farm, knew the old chevy they were getting 1500 bucks for on trade was going over seas? To a wealthy Arab who loved the look of the GM with big v/8 and whacky rear wheel openings, and was willing to pay whatever he needed to own one
I recall a pic, I think in a National Geographic magazine—an aerial view of cars parked on the sand for a giant market/bazaar/souq of some kind. Some giant percentage of the cars were Caprices.
Jim Klein, let me clarify.
By “try” I meant that I submitted a comment along with a link and a snippet. It didn’t post. Since it was possibly waiting to “clear customs” or whatever delays some postings, I chose not to resubmit and instead wait, as suggested by CC management.
If it doesn’t post I’ll resubmit.
Since you closed by mentioning the previous lighting topic, I’ll mention that you read an incomplete biased version. My posts were deleted. That has obviously slanted your opinion. I will gladly revisit that topic at any time.
If I was so wrong and look like such a fool, why not leave my posts up for the entire world to heckle me? Unlike others posts that do belong in the trash can, nothing impolite or bigoted to be found in my posts. No downside of giving the site a black eye by leaving my posts up. Dig mine out of the trash and put em back up. I am not ashamed nor afraid of anything I’ve posted. Anybody else, Daniel? Furthermore I stand by imy position and would be willing to fairly discuss or argue it to a conclusion. However, fairly includes not using the “chloroform” just because one lacks a logical refute to some verifiable and factual position.
In short it’s apparent that some enabled with the site’s delete permission use it as a personal tool to bolster their position when confronted with polite factual responses that draw their own personal take into question. Forget me, why was Schurkey gagged today?
Back on the original off-topic; when my link posts you can review it and we can discuss that.
Jim,
This is the last time I’m going to tell you this: nobody is deleting your posts. They are not in the Trash folder.
I’m beginning to have serious doubts about your judgment. You keep referring to missing posts that never existed.
Nobody is trying to gag you. Are you paranoid?
As long as you do not violate our commenting rules, have at it. But here’s the thing: Your false accusations about censorship, chloroform and such ARE in violation of our commenting policies. Here it is, and I suggest you read it carefully, not skim it like you do our posts (as you said yourself).:
CC’s Commenting Policy: Commenting at CC is a privilege, not a right. We review and moderate all comments. We insist that all commenting be kept civil, without any personal attacks on other commenters, the site, and its writers/contributors. Also, we do not allow politicking/overt political comments, racism, misogyny, and any comments that disparage any groups in general, and/or are overtly negative or critical in a manner that becomes obnoxious, offensive, or tedious. Simply expressing the same point of view repeatedly, even if it may appear inoffensive, can run afoul of our commenting moderation…Repeat and/or egregious offenders will lose their comment privileges at CC.
You are attacking the site by making these repeated false claims. You keep expressing this point of view repeatedly. These are violations. And I’m putting you on notice: if you continue to make them and are unable to engage in appropriate commenting discussions like all the others here, you will lose your commenting privilege.
This is not because of legitimate points of view in some of your comments, but for the reasons here stated (attacking the site and its writer/contributors). There’s a big difference. If you don’t know how to play with the big boys in the CC Commenting sand box, you’ll have to be asked to leave.
If really think comments of yours are being deleted, copy them first and send them to me in an email, and I will gladly confirm to see if that’s been the case. But I see no evidence of it so far.
Paul, because it was suggested before I did begin saving some of my posts that have since disappeared.
I’m not a scorekeeper, so only to demonstrate that I’m not making false claims
with permission from you and Dan we can revisit the day a fella stopped to inform Dan that he was using the wrong color flags to warn traffic.
Where should they go, back in the School Days thread?
After you review the posts I would appreciate an acknowledgement that they indeed were wiped.
Thank you
And as to your claims about “mandates to mingle different types of traffic” as the reason pedestrian deaths are up, Jim Klein has already addressed them almost exactly as I would have. You’re mangling information to try to suit some personal subjective POV. It doesn’t work. As is usually the case, it’s quite a bit more complicated than your conclusion.
Let’s set aside the world of what-ifs and optimistic could-be speculation for a moment and visit the reality of this week in Danville, “the safest city in California.”
I’m not joking, it’s sad.
With condolences to all involved, especially the deceased’s loved ones.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/07/20/report-former-49ers-assistant-coach-greg-knapp-critically-injured-in-bicycle-crash
“According to a statement from San Ramon police Lt. Tami Williams, officers responded to the area of Dougherty and North Monarch roads around 2:50 p.m. Saturday, and police and fire officials said Knapp suffered major injuries, possibly life threatening.
The unidentified driver swerved into the bike lane when Knapp was struck, the coach’s agent, Jeff Sperbeck, told NBCNews.com.”
If Mr Knapp could, I sincerely believe that he would second my opinion that commingling vehicle traffic with unprotected bike lanes is madness personified.
Again, sincere condolences.
That was in affluent wide-road Danville, check out “legacy infrastructure” Detroit once.
Jim, you are sadly highly mistaken in whatever your agenda here is. I actually used to live one town over from this location right off of Dougherty Road. That intersection isn’t even in Danville, it’s San Ramon. It’s a wealthy enclave off the 680 in SF’s East Bay. Danville btw has tons of little roads all over it, this is one of the bigger intersections in the area. Dougherty Road was a little two lane road in the country two decades ago without a hard shoulder.
Until about a decade and a half ago there were no bike lanes there, it was just a road with a shoulder and no bike lane. Are you under the impression that bicycles used to get their own roads distinct from where cars traveled? Did you think that sidewalks had a wall between them and the traffic lanes? They didn’t. It was exactly as it is now except the bikes just mingled with the cars and tried to stay to the right and the cars tried to avoid them. I don’t recall that there was even a sidewalk for (nonexistent in the Danville/San Ramon area) pedestrians. This is all FAR better than it used to be.
The deceased was obviously aware that a painted line isn’t protection, and neither was the status quo beforehand. Cars swerve into bike lanes all the time, it’s highly unfortunate. Before there were bike lanes, cars swerved onto shoulders all the time. That was unfortunate as well. Adding the bike lane did not have a negative effect as you seem to believe and there was no wholesale change to “make bikes commingle with vehicle traffic”.
I’m officially signing off of this discussion. I have tried to give you some benefit of the doubt but this is too much. Just stop it with these crazy conspiracy theories, it makes everything else you say less credible. I wish you the best of luck.
Am I mistaken or being mislead?
I’m at the mercy of the news reports for accuracy, and particularly one that showed a street view of the actual scene.
Here:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/nfl-star-greg-knapp-killed-by-driver-media-calls-it-an-accident/
“The street where Knapp was killed, Dougherty Road just north of Monarch Drive, is a six-lane arterial with a 50 miles-per-hour speed limit, no protected cycling infrastructure, and infrequent crosswalks for pedestrians.”
You once knew the area and seem to describe it being different, at least back then. Are you saying I was “fake newsed?” Or has the roadway recently changed significantly? I suppose either is possible. Another reason for me to put more weight in my own personal observations than in reported information.
If the roadway was recently significantly upgraded, why weren’t one of the more bicycle friendly lane designs incorporated then? California is supposed to be leading the way with that. From here it looks like plenty of room to have put the bike lane on the other side of the curb.
A last couple thoughts then I’m signing off too. So a decision is made to carve a bike lane out of a conventional roadway, without any investment beyond paint. Usually it’s done on the traffic side of parked cars. Puts the cyclist in place for direct engagement with moving cars.
Other places, by far fewer, I’ve noticed that parked cars are moved away from the curb and cyclists get a lane between curb and parked cars; well isolated from vehicle traffic. Looks like a toss-up on space and cost while safety for cyclist is significantly improved. No doubt there are things to go wrong with that arrangement too, but at least not every passing car becomes an immediate threat. Seems a lot more logical.
In closing I’m not pushing any agenda or conspiracy theory. Basically I am sharing a personal opinion which I’ve formed from my own observations. I was clear on that from the start. Namely that there are a lot of “experts” without a clue as to a given reality, yet seek to mandate to others who are actually engaged in that reality.
My suggestion is that when your hide is on the line you should ignore experts and their statistics and instead use your own sound judgement applied to the immediate situation.
Notice the beautiful smooth empty sidewalk paralleling Dougherty Rd. while separated from it by adequate barrier to protect from typical lane wandering traffic? Looks like a great place for an afternoon bike ride, too bad it’s been deemed illegal.
I have seen many traffic directives that were touted as “the only right and safe way” come and go. Safe passing, handling tire blowouts, traffic stops… all rescinded or amended.
Why should I bet my life and put blind faith in the current traffic engineering fads? They’ll probably soon be rescinded too.
I’m sure that in the future 50mph (that means 65) highway traffic commingled with unprotected bike traffic will be unheard of and seem as absurd as the old 3-lane “suicide” highway does now. May as well get ahead of the crowd now.
With that, I’ll begin my long awaited exit. Begin, I do turn back for thrown shoes. Lol
Best luck
Your link to pedbikeinfo and snippet did post about ten minutes after the other incomplete one, it’s above and is what I replied to. It’s still there currently. I do believe you are mistaken in your position, I’ve posted info/links that refutes it or at least offers an explanation that denies the existence of your premise as a whole (that there has been a “recent” push to integrate traffic users into the same space) and if you’d rather cling to your theory then whatever, no real biggie to me as long as the in my opinion correct explanation with contextual links that I read and provided is out there as well. If someone else posts something even more data driven and provable then great. If you were to post something that I deeply cared about and I could literally very easily factually prove wrong by being an expert in the field I would do so and keep on with it instead of wasting my time looking stuff up when it really doesn’t matter to me. Although I do believe misinformation can be dangerous, and there’s no reason for people to be un- or misinformed, hence sometimes I will look into stuff that seems far-fetched, usually it is, and if not I learned something.
I don’t know about the lighting posts, I was looking at that back and forth series of posts in near realtime as they went up, and don’t see what was incomplete on your end. Daniel posted all manner of links and documentation that took it out of the realm of his “opinions”, you did nothing of the sort. If you think that stuff gets deleted after going live then I’d start taking some screenshots and sending them to Paul via email. The only posts I personally have ever deleted are a few things I myself wrote that I thought better of as well and decided I’d rather not have out there as well as a few completely unrelated to anything posts by others that were frankly of an offensive nature or clearly spam back when I was running this site a couple of years ago. If someone wants to make themselves look foolish, they can have at it. Note that if I were to delete my own post and it had been replied to by anyone, then that reply would disappear as well, a reply can’t stand on its own without the prior context and is tied to the first post. If that was the case then I don’t know (if someone deleted a post that you responded to), but every logged-in user has the ability to edit or delete their own post for fifteen minutes when everything is working correctly.
I don’t know anything about the Schurkey thing, it looks like a comment of his is still up a few above where you said that about deleting. Was there another post? I myself never saw it.
Some posts get caught in the filter before going live. They then almost always get found and approved, likely a few never get found. Sometimes there is a lag time, yours aren’t the only ones. Yours also aren’t ALL that way, some do go straight live. I don’t know why, I’m not that techy, we have looked into it without good answers. I have also not seen any of your posts be “disappeared” once they are live and I’m on this site quite a bit. I used to run the site for about half a year, your (or anyone else’s) posts certainly aren’t monitored or flagged for approval before going live beyond the default spam filters. When you express a question or statement re “disappearing” posts and Paul questions you about it, I literally am just as baffled as he is and would write the same questions back that he did, just like earlier this evening re Schurkey. In fact on that one I was contemplating it and then Paul asked you ten minutes later.
I don’t recall another car that was so mourned when on its way out. Some new Caprices were stockpiled by fleets, both public and private – an unusual move. Most owners loved ’em.
Many “total rebuild” campaigns were created to extend Caprice’s service life. At least one bumper-to- bumper rebuild offer was heavily promoted by a Chevrolet dealership. Even government owned police cars were being rebuilt. Again, otherwise unheard of.
All in all they were good old fashioned Detroit iron. Easy to buy, easy to keep going, hard to kill.
I know our police department in Kalispell, MT, felt this way. My neighbor across the street growing up was a KPD officer, so I got a lot of feedback from him. They hung on to their LT1 Caprices well into the 2000’s, reluctantly replacing them with Crown Vics and Tahoes a bit at a time.
The LT1 was a great performer, and other than glass water pumps and Opti-Sparkless, were pretty stout.
Another well written and informative article .
I enjoy most of the replies too, I’ve been a fan of the MoPar (now sold by JEEP dealers) “Heat Riser Solvent” (what it was called long ago) , I never knew GM had the same product, I’ll give a look for some ad the MoPar stuff no longer comes with a snorkel .
You’re a very brave man, kudos for that and 21 years as well .
-Nate
Thanks, Nate. They’ve deleted the red straw from the Mopar solvent? Sheesh. Cheapskates!
Not only did they delete the snorkel ;
The last time I was mid way across America and needed some proper solvent / lock lubricant I headed to the nearest JEEP dealer, they were super busy and the uppity parts guy said he had NO IDEA what I wanted so I walked past him into the service area and grabbed a can ~ “I want this. don’t tell me you don’t know what it is, they use ROAD SALT HERE ” ~
‘Oh, that . well, that’s not supposed to be sold to the public’ .
Lying stupid jerkhoff , one more reason why no one likes dealers .
In my City job at a huge heavy duty shop (trucks & road building equipment) we used this stuff by the case .
-Nate
“Not supposed to be sold to the public”…? Wow. That guy needed a raise; they clearly weren’t paying him enough to come up with better than dog-ate-my-homework level lies.
You’d be surprised how often I hear this at dealers parts counters .
Yamaha has an incredible carby cleaner stuff you dilute with water, heat and soak old grimy carbys in, when I tried to buy it from Pasadena Yamaha I got *exactly* the same rigamarole ~ ‘don’t know what it is’ .
Really ? lets look in the price book and I’ll show it to you .
‘Oh, that, we don’t have it.
O.K. lets walk to the service department….
‘We’re not allowed to sell that to the public ‘.
F-you jerkhoff, I’ll buy it from someone who appreciates my dollars .
The same B.S. when I worked for Natzel Oldsmobile in Pasadena, they’d rather loose customers than be helpful .
-Nate
Awright, quit holdin’ out, you! What are the specifics on this magical Yamaha carb cleaner? Part number…?
I never hold out on knowledge Mr. Stern ;
Yamaha P/N : ACC-CARBC-LE-NR
Link to Amazon if your local dealer isn’t honest : https://us.amazon.com/Yamalube-Carburetor-Cleaner-Dip-oz/dp/B002GU4SPA
Be aware that this product will strip off the black paint used on man older Motocyle carbys .
-Nate
Looks like it’s discontinued/not available anywhere. Aw well, wasn’t an urgent need!
“Paul Niedermeyer
Posted July 26, 2021 at 10:05 PM
Jim,
This is the last time I’m going to tell you this: nobody is deleting your posts. They are not in the Trash folder.
I’m beginning to have serious doubts about your judgment. You keep referring to missing posts that never existed.”
Paul, I believe that you believe that nobody is deleting my posts. However, the reality is that some-body/thing is IN FACT deleting my posts – after they successfully posted.
I heard it last time, my saying “in-fac” doesn’t make it so.
I can now alleviate your concerns with my judgement because I’ve developed the habit of “screenshoting” my posts. Where would you like to have a look at my most recent polite factual post which was deleted?
How about this? The person who’s deleting my posts be an adult about it and simply say so? Save Paul the hassle, he has enough on his plate.
I caught a message the other day scolding somebody for their comment on bus sketches… doesn’t that rule apply to all?
Jim, it appears that someone has actually been deleting some of your comments. And they went to a folder where I did not think to look for them. But it will not happen again, as that person no longer has the ability to do so.
My sincere apologies.
“…someone has actually been deleting some of your comments. And they went to a folder where I did not think to look for them.”
Did you find my missing posts? It’s been a long time, but I remember seeing at least one…reloading the page…and it’s gone. Maybe more than one, in more than one article.
Most of the time, they just don’t post at all. But some do. I can’t find a pattern.
Thank you