Just want to note that car is approximately 18 feet long and 7 feet wide (approx. 5.5m long and 2m wide in non-Freedom Units). It’s amazing to me that it can actually fit on most European streets.
It also has an unladen weight of ~4900 lbs (~2200kg).
Not too many 1970s American cars I would recommend to Europeans. In fact… none.
Evocative of French thrillers with garish American road-boats driven by fugitive Vichy collaborators who reinvent themselves as ruthless crime lords…
… I imagine.
A Caddy limo, of all creatures, starts off our bizarre trip in Luis Buñuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie {The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie}. I always thought that alone was surreal AF.
Yeah. Modern ginormobiles get special import licenses here like they give to things like fire engines and the like. Special purpose vehicles. It’s so that rescue vehicles are still available even if they don’t make them for Europe. Which leads to the local clamper having American trucks with spiked wheels up at arm height to me cycling around town…
In the past the US had many European brands that they used such as Opel which was GM but is now a bit more mixed. Or Saab, which they ran into the ground.
So now they are left with cars that aren’t really designed for the local market. Apart from local arseholes who really want to show that fact off publicly.
That looks familiar.
Talk about a boxy design language. The designers must have lost sleep trying to figure out how to get the rim covers in on the act.
Dali’s ride. Real, growing grass. No joke:
Then there’s his Rainy Day Taxi… (a 1938 Cadillac Series 62 convertible) but it was not meant to be driven.
I dunno… maybe it’s time to go back to using a more balanced combination of mechanical and computing in cars…
Apparently Volvo uses brake by wire in these cars, so there’s no physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes. When drivers are in “B” mode (regenerative mode) and doing “one pedal driving” there is a software bug that can cause the brakes to not engage properly. The workaround for now is to use regular “D” drive mode, but it’s pretty wild that a bug like this got through testing.
Couldn’t figure out exactly how old this Peugeot is. It has door handles that look like the ones that AMC put on every make of their cars, including imported Renaults (but except Jeeps?). It made me misremember that AMC imported Peugeots, as well.
Also saw a Peugeot pickup (similar front end) on the same outing, but I was too slow with the camera. This is in Addis Ababa; I can’t remember when I saw a Peugeot in the U.S. after the one my great aunt had 40+ years ago.
Looks mid-1980ies to me. Production ran from 1979–1995 and Peugeot hat an assembly plant in Nigeria at the time.
US model with those weird standard headlights:
Don’t play “chicken” with an aircraft carrier. Unless you’re a lighthouse.
Love that 1980s boxy look. Pininfarina designed!
Its headlights and their particular mode of installation look similar to recessed lights in ceilings.
