I had one in the 90's. It was cool but I sold it after one of my buddies urinated on the carpet in the back seat.
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Pick your favorite iconic car from any decade....
- Thread starter Iridescentone
- Start date
Logistics guy at my office has a black one - he bought it new. His kids were driving it up to a couple months ago, when they got something newer/cooler. He's still running it though - I saw it in the parking lot last week!
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For me the most iconic car out there is the Citroën DS (third nose 1968-1975).
I've chosen to post a pic of a rally version, because I love that they took it rallying.
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I like this Citroën SM (Citroën-Maserati). Iconic car.
Ah, a fellow Citroën afficionado.
The SM is a to lust after luxury car from yesteryear.
Some other Citroëns I find great:
- DS obviously, can save a worldleader from an ambush on 3 wheels
- 2CV obviously, great for transporting eggs while wearing your favourite hat
- CX - notable variation: the Loadrunner https://amklassiek.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Citroen_cx_loadrunner-bj_90.jpg
- BX - notable variations: the BX 4TC Citroën BX 4TC, a group B rally car Citroën is ashamed of. / BX GTI, a car iconic to us lowlanders due to the movie Flodder. Can be bought with a polaroid.
- Traction Avant - be careful of nazi officers commandeering it
- HY panel van - Citroën H Van / fun fact: in the anime movie Akira (1988) the Tokyo police force uses vans that seem heavily inspired on the HY van.
- Mehari - To me made iconic by Louis de Funès in the Le Gendarme movies. Oh I remember as a kid on a lazy sunday afternoon watching Louis de Funès movies with my father and laughing our asses off.
- Citroën Xsara Kit Car - Invalid Link Removed In 1999 this normally aspirated front-wheel-drive rally car took the overall win in the Rallye Catalunya, humiliating the higher powered turbo 4wd WRC cars. For that this forgotten hero of motorsport deserves a salute.
- AX - an ex-girlfriend owned one. One day I took the badge that said Citroën of the rear and replace it with a homemade badge that said Sitrowen. I thought that was funny. I was alone in that opinion.
- Xantia - not that special but in the early 2000s this was a great semi-luxury car that flew under the radar compared to german offerings in the segment
And the car I liked driving the most: the C15. Link Removed
Why you'd ask?
In the mid 2000s I worked at a company as a service technician. They issued me an old C15 while all my collegues had new Citroën Berlingo's or Renault Master vans. But when driving on construcion sites my C15 was superb off-road. It is like a mountain goat. I absolutely adored it.I should search for one to buy second hand and use it as a beater runabout.
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I worked at a Ford dealership in the mid 90s and they sent 4 of us on a trip about 200 miles away to visit the Ford assembly plant in St. Paul MN. We drove a used Ford Probe borrowed off the lot.
Being the shortest, I rode in the back seat both there and back. Even at only 5' 7", it was so cramped in the back that I was actually in pain for most of the 7 hours of drive time I endured in total.
What a piece of crap. I literally have nothing good to say about that thing, except that Ford was at least aware enough of its absolute suckiness to discontinue it before too long.
It's incomprehensible to me why Ford ever decided to produce and market what is essentially a Mazda compact car with 4 cylinders and front wheel drive as a replacement for the truly iconic Mustang in the first place. What **** were they thinking?
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I remember the uproar when they announced it to be the replacement for the Mustang. I read a lot of car magazines back then. It was always kind of an oddball car, and I'm fascinated by oddball cars. However, I never drove or even rode in a Probe, so I have to take everyone else's word for what it was like.
A friend of mine had the Audi version of the Volkswagen Scirocco, one of the early ones. It had rear tires that were too big for the wheel wells, so they scraped all the time, and the passenger side seat didn't move, anymore, so to sit in the back seat, you had to really scramble in there, usually by squeezing through the space on the driver's side, which wasn't much. It was never lost on me what a death trap that car was. I remember riding over the old McKinley bridge in St. Louis, which at the time had extra roadway more or less tacked onto the outside of the bridge. It was in really bad shape then (closed shortly after), and I remember looking down at the water and thinking man, if anything goes wrong in this car, I'm in trouble. Later on, we actually were in a flood in that car, and I was in the back seat. We got off the road before it got bad, but it was kind of funny that it actually did wind up happening.
The Probe was pretty much killed off in the UK by... Steve Coogan. He did a show with different characters every week and one was an awful sales rep who was obsessed with his Probe, that made the car a laughing stock before it had really got established and so it never really took off.
Gareth Cheeseman
Coogan is well known as being a car nut and gives a lot of thought to the cars his characters drive, he is quoted as saying Alan Partridge is the type of man who’d drive a Jag but something about the Lexus was just funnier. Also, in Saxondale, he said the main character would really have had the classic Bullitt-era Mustang but that car was too cool so he drove a ‘70s Mach 1 that looked a bit more dated and fit the feel of the show better.
Gareth Cheeseman
Coogan is well known as being a car nut and gives a lot of thought to the cars his characters drive, he is quoted as saying Alan Partridge is the type of man who’d drive a Jag but something about the Lexus was just funnier. Also, in Saxondale, he said the main character would really have had the classic Bullitt-era Mustang but that car was too cool so he drove a ‘70s Mach 1 that looked a bit more dated and fit the feel of the show better.
I had a Scirocco for about 2 years. I took a road trip with a friend of mine and one of the rear wheels fell off while we were doing 70mph on a busy interstate.
Pray that never happens to you. I vividly remember glancing at my friend sitting in the passenger seat while I'm trying to steer the car on to the median without crashing into a semi truck and seeing the look of sheer terror on his face.
Sure, we laugh about it now . . .
My dad owned one of these when I was a kid. He said that he had to settle for the 302 because they had some big home improvement stuff to pay for. I remember the black vinyl seats searing and melting any flesh that came in contact with them. I also remember my dad replacing several power steering pumps on the thing. He said it actually drove terribly.
My first car was a 1969 Ford Fairlane in that same green color with a 302. It was not a very good car from a rust standpoint.
You should post this in the "What’s one thing you’ve done that you’re confident you’re the only person on TB to have done that?" thread!
I was once driving on a 6-lane highway (3 lanes each side) passing 2 long rows of trucks to my right. Continious safety rail to my left. I was 18 and been driving for just a month or two.
I was going 160 km/h (100 mph).
Then a front tyre blew out.
Luckily I was able to remain steady, and on 3 tyres I had to weave through the heavy traffic of trucks toward the shoulder.
That was scary.
Front-wheel drive Nissan Primera naturally aspirated diesel before anyone asks.
You should post this in the "What’s one thing you’ve done that you’re confident you’re the only person on TB to have done that?" thread!
Been there, done that. Neighbor's F350 with 42" Super Swampers, he had the wrong lug nuts on the front wheels and one came off when we were doing about 45mph..... imagine being passed by a 42" tire on a main road.
Other than my neighbor's pride and a rather expensive front brake rotor, no one was hurt.
You should post this in the "What’s one thing you’ve done that you’re confident you’re the only person on TB to have done that?" thread!
It was common in the 80s and 90s for older, warn out cars with more than 150,000 miles on the clock, for wheel bearings to fail catastrophically, resulting in wheels falling off while driving (most often at high speed, when higher bearing temperatures are produced).
I personally know quite a few people who've experienced wheels falling off while driving, although none of them in the 21st century.
Vehicles are vaaaaaastly safer now than they were only a decade ago
I saw that once being a passenger in a semi-truck.
One the wheels of the trailer came off. It passed us, started bouncing, and bounced over an overpass, on to the oncoming lane and into the grass.
No accidents luckily.
Things like this are the reason that I'm am advocate for annual safety inspections. NY has them, and while there's parts of the regulations that I disagree with, overall it's a good thing.
I'm aware that many states don't mandate inspections and that scares me thinking about the unsafe junk that's rolling down the interstate at 70mph.
