I love huge American land yachts, and I think this car is a wonderful time capsule from the 1980s:
That’s the epitome of 1980s American luxury: metallic light brown, long lines of chrome, padded vinyl roof, whitewall tires. It’s a weird combination of very clean, simple lines – but wildly over-jeweled. It’s like movie starlet wearing a simple dress, but … jewelry on her wrists, fingers, ankles, ears, and neck.
When you open the doors, the kitsch luxury continues with acres of thickly padded brown leather:
It’s just a nice, chill, quiet, 1970s place to be. It’s like your favorite dark old steak restaurant. You know it’s nowhere near as good as the new place, but… you’ve got memories together.
This ain’t a hot rod. The Cadillac HT4100 engine was an infamously bad design that produced less than 150 horsepower. That’s not nearly enough to motivate this two-ton monster that’s actually longer than a modern Cadillac Escalade.
These 80s luxury cars are surprisingly affordable – you can pick ’em up for $10k-$15k, even in good condition like this. It’s only got 15,000 miles on it! These are never going to be rare or investor-quality though because so many of ’em were made, and so many were sold to retirees who took good care of ’em.
They’re just nice, fun, chill time capsules, and I look forward to taking it to dinner on the Strip.
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I like the “sofa” on the second picture, that’s very ‘merican. You don’t find that in Europe. The only car with that is the Citroën DS.
Fun fact: in the Citroën DS you can bend the front seat to the back and they perfectly match the back seats. As result you will have a double bed in the car. Then, in the cabriolet version, you can open the ceiling and see the stars.
The Citroën DS also had the first hydropneumatic suspension (which saved the life to Charles de Gaulle), first directional headlights, first disc brakes, and tons of other features that you can read on wikipedia
Yeah, I always like seeing Citroens at car shows here. They’re quite rare, but beautiful. I can only imagine the maintenance costs on those here!
Congratulations, what a magnificent time capsule of a barge. You might enjoy the Brougham Society over on Hagerty https://www.hagerty.com/media/tags/brougham-society/
Thanks!
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